Advances in digital image steganography

The growing risk of cyber security needs to be urgently addressed as data is one of the most important assets to be taken care of during transmission over the internet. Data security generally means protecting data from intruders and unauthorized users or the persons other than the communicating parties. This not only provides high security but also prevent data from modification. To improve the security features in case of data transfers over the internet, the techniques that have been known till now are like Cryptography, Steganography. Where Cryptography is defined as the method to conceal information by encrypting plaintexts to cipher texts and later transmitting it to the intended recipient using an unknown key, on the other hand Steganography provides or say extends security further to a high level by hiding the cipher text into text, image or other formats. Watermarking and fingerprinting are the other two technologies used parallel with steganography in the field of data hiding. Watermarking is the practice of imperceptibly altering work to embed a secret message, concerned with the protection of intellectual property, while unique marks are embedded in the cover object that are received by different people in fingerprinting. In this paper, we are presenting some views in the development of image steganography, the particular field is selected because of its good capability to hide data without easily discoverable by the human visual system.