Steganography is the technique for exchanging concealed secret information in a way to avoid suspicion. The aim of Steganography is to transfer secrete message to another party by hiding the data in a cover object, so that the imposter who monitors the traffic should not distinguish between genuine secret message and the cover object. This paper presents the comparative study and performance analysis of different image Steganography methods using various types of cover media ((like BMP/JPEG/PNG etc.) with the discussion of their file formats. We also discuss the embedding domains along with a discussion on salient technical properties, applications, limitations, and Steganalysis.

In this paper, we propose a novel JPEG image Steganography algorithm based on partition schemes on image coefficient values. Our method selects the AC and DC coefficients of a JPEG image according to a channel selection method and then identifies appropriate coefficients to store the secret data-bits. As opposed to other reported works, in our algorithm each selected coefficient can store a variable number of data-bits that are decided using the concept called ‘Partition Scheme’. Experimental results indicate the suitability of the proposed algorithm as compared to other existing methods.