Novel and secure encoding and hiding techniques using image steganography: A survey

Steganography is the art of passing information in a manner that the very existence of the message is unknown. The goal of steganography is to avoid drawing suspicion to the transmission of a hidden message. If suspicion is raised, then this goal is defeated. It serves as a better way of securing message than cryptography which only conceals the content of the message not the existence of the message. Original message is being hidden within a carrier such that the changes so occurred in the carrier are not observable. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. The recent growth in computational power and technology has propelled it to the forefront of today´s security techniques. This paper presents a review of the literature on different types of contemporary steganography techniques for image in spatial and transform domains and steganalysis techniques for the detection of secret message in the image. In addition, research trends and challenges are identified and directions for future research are discussed.