Abstract

Data hiding approach aims to embed some secret information into a carrier data signal by altering the unimportant components for copyright protection or secret communication. In some cases, the data-hiding operation will lead to distortion in the host image. However, these distortion, is unacceptable to some applications, e.g., medical or military images. In this case it is critical to embed the supplementary secret message with a reversible manner so that the original contents can be perfectly restored after extraction of the hidden data. There are number of information hiding techniques with the features that not only the message needs to be exactly extracted, but also the cover itself should be restored losslessly. This characteristic is important in some special context such as law forensics, military imagery and medical imagery. In these applications, the cover is very valuable or important to be damaged. So in the following text various techniques for data hiding are discussed. The survey is about how the data hiding techniques have gradually evolved with time and how techniques and methods when merged together can be effective.

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