Steganography and Related Fields

The general idea of hiding some information in digital content has a wider class of applications that go beyond steganography. The techniques involved in such applicationsare collectively referred to as information hiding.

Digital watermarking

A special case of information hiding is digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into digital multimedia content such that the information (the watermark) can later be extracted or detected for a variety of purposes including copy prevention and control. Digital watermarking has become an active and important area of research, and development and commercialization of watermarking techniques is being deemed essential to help address some of the challenges faced by the rapid proliferation of digital content.

Information hiding Vs. Watermarking?

The key difference between information hiding and watermarking is the absence of an active adversary. In watermarking applications like copyright protection and authentication, there is an active adversary that would attempt to remove, invalidate or forge watermarks. In information hiding there is no such active adversary as there is no value associated with the act of removing the information hidden in the content. Nevertheless, information hiding techniques need to be robust against accidental distortions.

Information hiding , Watermarking and Steganography

Unlike information hiding and digital watermarking, the main goal of steganography is to communicate securely in a completely undetectable manner.

The majority of today’s Steganographic systems use multimedia objects like image, audio, video etc as cover media because people often transmit digital pictures over email and other Internet communication. In modern approach, depending on the nature of cover object, Steganography can be divided into five types:

1. Text Steganography
2. Image Steganography
3. Audio Steganography
4. Video Steganography
5. Protocol Steganography

 So, in the modern age so many Steganographic techniques have been designed which works with the above concerned objects. More often in today’s security advancement, we sometimes come across certain cases in which a combination of Cryptography and Steganography are used to achieve data privacy over secrecy. Various software tools are also available in this regard.

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