A survey of recent advances in image steganography

Over the course of technological development, data security while transmission and storing has always been a field of continuous advancements and key importance. In the recent times, its importance has increased even further and the main reason behind this is the increase in the amount of data that is being transferred over internet and various networks. Although there are cryptographic approaches to handle these situations, steganography provides a different aspect to the solution. While cryptography encrypts the data such that the cipher text is visible to human eye, but the meaning of that encrypted text is never known. Steganography is the process of hiding data in plain sight inside some images, audio, video and so on, such that it is very difficult for the viewer to directly differentiate if there is some data hidden in the host or not. This paper consists a study of various methodologies to implement Image steganography like spatial domain manipulation, encryption based and deep learning approaches. The paper focuses upon recent advances in all these approaches for image steganography and aims to help other researches in this domain to understand recent developments as well future advancements possible in the same field. Furthermore, this paper illustrates about how different image formats effect various image steganography methods and how the various image color models interact with image steganography. Later this article sheds some light on the domain of steganalysis and reports about the fundamental principles as well as various implementations of steganalysis systems in recent times.