Image Steganography: A Conceptual Study of Different Techniques

In the era of internet, a large number of important files is shared through the internet. These files are of great significance from the point of view of privacy. So proper security is needed in order to achieve the secure transfer of files, many different techniques are used so that data in these files can’t be intercepted by the third party. To achieve security, different technologies like cryptography and steganography are used. In cryptography, information is encrypted but its existence is not hidden. But in Steganography, the existence of secure information is also hidden. Steganography is the novel and decent technique of embedding important secret information in the cover medium like text, audio, video etc. The main use of steganography is to hide the important information as well as its existence from the third party. This paper discusses image steganography and various techniques used in image steganography. In image steganography, to achieve the secure transfer of information, the message is embedded into an image which acts as a cover image and after applying different steganography techniques, a stego-image is generated that contains the hidden information. There are various techniques of image steganography like Spatial Technique, Transformation Technique, Distortion Domain Technique, Masking and filtering etc. KeywordsSteganography, stego-image, Spatial Domain Technique, Transform Domain Techniques, Distortion Domain Techniques, Masking and filtering, Magic LSB, Cyclic LSB.