A Systematic Review of Computational Image Steganography Approaches

Abstract

With the rapid growth of multimedia technologies, many images are communicated over public channels. Therefore, significant interest has been given to providing secure transmission of images over public channels. Encryption approaches are extensively utilized to secure multimedia data. However, the encrypted images are meaningless, so attackers can easily trace that the corresponding image contains some secret information. To overcome this problem, information hiding approaches such as steganography and watermarking have been introduced. Image steganography is the process of hiding secret contents in a cover image. Thus, the secret contents are hidden in such a way that it is not perceptible to the human eyes. In image steganography, the statistical model of an image is crucial for hiding information in less detectable pixels and attaining better protection. This paper aims to present a systematic review of image steganography approaches. Articles are selected from reputable databases such as IEEE Explore, Web of Science (WOS), ACM, and Willey. We describe the approaches to image steganography in this paper, including their basic concepts, performance parameters, and types. Extensive comparisons are drawn among the existing image steganography approaches to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages over each other. Blockchain based steganography techniques are also evaluated for better stego-medium. A number of future directions are presented that can assist researchers in determining the direction of future research in image steganography.