Image Steganography Techniques: an Overview

Steganography – the art and science of hiding information has received much attention in the recent years. It can also be defined as the study of invisible communication that usually involves communication of secret data in an appropriate carrier, e.g., image, audio, video or TCP/IP header file. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. The main goal of steganography is to ensure that the transmitted message is completely masked, thereby ensuring that the message is accessible only to the intended receiver and does not attract attention from eavesdroppers and attackers. This paper is an attempt to study the various techniques use in steganography and provide a general overview of different algorithms of image steganography. There exists a large variety of steganography techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points.