Digital Image Information Hiding Methods for Protecting Transmitted Data: A Survey

摘要

The increased availability of the internet and massive growth of new communication technologies have made data transmission much easier. However, the security threats and vulnerabilities launched against the internet channel hinder this communication which ends up by making data available to the unauthorized users. Information hiding is one of the techniques to overcome this severe challenge. The process of concealing confidential data into multimedia carriers such as text, audio, image, and video refers to information (or data) hiding. Its main purpose is to protect data while disguising the presence of the hidden data and communication itself which keeps user privacy, data confidentiality, integrity and copyright protection since information sharing is kept confidential. Digital images are one the most popular multimedia carriers that are used in information hiding due to their pervasiveness and high redundancy. Hence, this paper presents a valuable survey on the existing digital image information hiding approaches developed using difference expansion (DE) and pixel value modification (PVM) techniques. Besides, fundamental concepts, illustrations and analysis on the performance of all methods reviewed coupled with the current trends on digital image information hiding are also presented so as to identify new direction for feature research.