An Overview of Pixel Value Differencing Based Data Hiding Techniques

Steganography is the science of invisible communication with its widespread applications in the area of secret exchange of information. Steganography research has seen tremendous growth in the recent past with its focus on image based steganography. Image based steganography research can be classified as spatial and transform domain. Methods developed in both of these domains fulfill different requirements of invisible communication. Imperceptibility, hiding capacity, and security are key parameters to assess steganography methods. Pixel value differencing (PVD) based methods are the most promising and most researched methods today. This paper presents an overview of progression of PVD based image steganography methods. Attempts in different successive methods have been done towards resolving issues associated with previous methods and to improve different quality parameters.