A Review of Digital Image Steganography
Pradeep Kumar Saraswat1,* and Dr. R. K. Gupta2
1,*Research Scholar, IT, Singhania University, Rajasthan, India
2Professor, Faculty of Engg. & Tech., HR Group of Institutions, Ghaziabad, U.P., India
Steganography is defined as the science or even possibly art of hiding likely critical information within other, seemingly benign information. The point of steganography is to prevent the detection of information leakage, not encrypt data. However, there is nothing stopping a user, malicious or otherwise from first encrypting a secret message and then embedding it inside harmless information. The process only deals with embedding one bit stream (the hidden information) inside of another bit stream. Either bit stream can be of any form. However, steganography is frequently used in conjunction with cryptography. In one method, the plain-text would first be encrypted and then feed to the steganography program. This ensures that if the hidden message is retrieved, the plain-text will still be encrypted. The reverse procedure also works. Two technologies that are closely related to steganography are watermarking and fingerprinting. These technologies are mainly concerned with the protection of intellectual property, thus the algorithms have different requirements than steganography. In watermarking all of the instances of an object are “marked” in the same way. The kind of information hidden in objects when using watermarking is usually a signature to signify origin or ownership for the purpose of copyright protection. With fingerprinting on the other hand, different, unique marks are embedded in distinct copies of the carrier object that are supplied to different customers. This enables the intellectual property owner to identify customers who break their licensing agreement by supplying the property to third parties.
