Steganography A Data Hiding Technique

Steganography implements an encryption technique in which communication takes place by hiding information. A hidden message is the combination of a secret message with the carrier message. This technique can be used to hide the message in an image, a video file, an audio file or in a file system. There are large variety of steganography techniques that will be used for hiding secret information in images. The final output image is called as a stego-image which consists of a secret message or information. Imperceptibility, payload, and robustness are three most important parameters for audio steganography. For a more secure approach, encryption can be used, which will encrypt the secret message using a secret key and then sent to the receiver. The receiver after receiving the message then decrypts the secret message to obtain the original one. In this paper, compared steganography with cryptography, which is an encrypting technique and explained how steganography provides better security in terms of hiding the secret message. In this paper, the various techniques are illustrated, which are used in steganography and studying the implementation of those techniques. Also, demonstrated the implementation process of one of the steganography techniques. A comparative analysis is performed between various steganographic tools by using the sample test images and test data. The quality metrics such as PSNR and SSIM are calculated for the final output images which are used for rating the tools. This paper also discusses about the Steganalysis which is known as the process of identifying the use of steganography