Coverless Image Steganography: Review

Abstract

Due to the digitization of information and the attack on different types of multimedia data, information security has become a key concern. For years, image steganography has been considered one of the best ways to protect sensitive information. In image steganography, a secret message is hidden within a cover image by modifying some pixels, forming a stego-image as a result. In turn, this modification makes it possible for steganalysis algorithms to detect the hidden secret message. To address this issue, the concept of coverless image steganography has emerged. With this approach, instead of modifying the content of the cover images, a mapping relationship is established. This mapping relationship maps the secret message to those cover images that contain its content, without modifying the covers themselves. This paper reviews some of the recent works that have been conducted on the topic of coverless image steganography and provide an important insight into how these techniques are performed.