Image Steganography Approaches and Their Detection Strategies: A Survey

Steganography is the art and science of hidden (or covered) communication. In digital steganography, the bits of image, video, audio and text files are tweaked to represent the information to hide. This article covers the current methods for hiding information in images, alongside steganalysis methods that aim to detect the presence of steganography. By reviewing 456 references, this article discusses the different approaches that can be taken toward steganography and its much less widely studied counterpart. Currently in research older steganography approaches are more widely used than newer methods even though these show greater potential. New methods do have flaws; therefore, more research is needed to make these practically applicable. For steganalysis one of the greatest challenges is the generalisability. Often one scheme can detect the presence of one specific hiding method. More research is needed to combine current schemes and/or create new generalisable schemes. To allow readers to compare results between different papers in our work, performance indications of all steganalysis methods are outlined and a comparison of performance is included. This comparison is given using 'topological sorting' graphs, which compares detection results from all papers (as stated in the papers themselves) on different steganographic schemes.