Current status and key issues in image steganography: A survey

Steganography and steganalysis are the prominent research fields in information hiding paradigm. Steganography is the science of invisible communication while steganalysis is the detection of steganography. Steganography means covered writing that hides the existence of the message itself. Digital steganography provides potential for private and secure communication that has become the necessity of most of the applications in today's world. Various multimedia carriers such as audio, text, video, image can act as cover media to carry secret information. In this paper, we have focused only on image steganography. This article provides a review of fundamental concepts, evaluation measures and security aspects of steganography system, various spatial and transform domain embedding schemes. In addition, image quality metrics that can be used for evaluation of stego images and cover selection measures that provide additional security to embedding scheme are also highlighted. Current research trends and directions to improve on existing methods are suggested. (C). 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.