Image Steganography Techniques

Image Steganography Techniques: Hiding messages in Images

Introduction
The word steganography is derived from the Greek words “stegos” meaning “cover” and “grafia” meaning “writing” defining it as “covered writing”. There are 5 kinds of Steganography: Text, Image, Audio/Video and Protocol (Joshi, R. et al. 2013). The term Steganography refers to the art of covert communications. By implementing steganography, it is possible for Alice to send a secret message to Bob in such a way that no-one else will know that the message exists (Bateman, P. and Schaathun, H. 2008).

Images are considered as the most popular file formats used in steganography. They are known for constituting a non-causal medium, due to the possibility to access any pixel of the image at random. In addition, the hidden information could remain invisible to the eye. However, the image steganography techniques will exploit "holes" in the Human Visual System (Hamid, N. et al. 2012)

Scientific Review
As the computer, the internet and the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) started to boost, steganography has gone digital (Cheddad, A. and Condell, J. 2010). The popular images to try steganography are binary images and 3D images and steganography for such types of images have shown a lot of progress but researchers focus on using grey-scale and colour images to hide data. Grey-scale images are preferred over colour images as it is easy to detect the route of encryption because of the disturbances of correlations between colour components (Li, B. and He, J. 2011).

There are various techniques used for Image steganography which are performed on various formats of images. Some of the techniques include:

Least Significant Bit technique – In this method, the image is scanned row wise and it is encoded in binary. Then, the message is also encoded in binary. The image size and the message size are compared. Once done, a random pixel from the image is chosen and is divided into three parts i.e.

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