A systematic overview of secure image steganography

Abstract

Information is a vital thing that needs to be secured and well protected during transmission between two or more parties over the internet. This can be achieved by steganography technology. Steganography is the concealing science in which the information is concealed inside other information in a way that the concealed information cannot be detectable by the human eye. Many ways are available to hide data inside a cover media for example text, image, and audio steganography, but image steganography is the most utilized technique among the others. Secure image steganography has a high-security level than traditional technique by combining steganography with cryptography due to encrypting secret information by cryptography algorithm before embedding it into the cover media by steganography algorithm. In this paper, a systematic review has been presented about secure image steganography and its renowned types. Many researchers proposed secure image steganography by using various cryptography and steganography algorithms which have been reviewed. The least significant bit ‘LSB’ was the renowned steganography algorithm which has been used by researchers due to its simplicity, while various cryptography algorithms like advanced encryption standard (AES) and blowfish have been used to propose secure image steganography in the reviewed papers. The comparison among the reviewed papers indicated that the LSB with hash-RSA gave a greater peak signal-noise ratio ‘PSNR’ value than the others which was 74.0189 dB.