Performance analysis of image steganalysis techniques and future research directives

Abstract

Steganography is a technique of hiding information imperceptibly inside other medium so that the very fact of communication taking place remains hidden. Recently, the reach of internet has extensively widened through social networking and blogging websites and a high amount of digital media interchange, especially in the form of digital images is being witnessed. This poses a huge threat to security from hackers and terrorists, as this medium can be used for covert communication, thus justifying the need for good steganalysis techniques to detect the existence of hidden messages in digital images. This paper analyses some steganalysis techniques which attack various kinds of spatial domain steganography techniques. Some of them are chi-square attack, triples analysis, sample pair analysis, TPVD steganalysis and analysis of adjacent pixel pair steganalysis. This paper also identifies the current research challenges and discusses possible directions for future research in this field.