Steganographic Techniques of Data Hiding using Digital Images

Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular to be used, because of their frequency on the Internet. For hiding those secret information in images there exist a large variety of steganographic techniques, some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications may have different requirements of the steganography techniques to be used. Some applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information while some other may require a larger secret message to be hidden. This paper gives an overview of image steganography and its uses and techniques. It also uses to identify the requirements of a good steganographic algorithm and briefly reflects on which steganographic techniques are more suitable for which applications.