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Steganography and steganalysis is a relatively new-fangled scientific discipline in security systems and digital forensics, respectively, but one that has matured greatly over the past two decades.

Overall, this work is an attempt to create a better understanding of image steganography and its coupling with the encryption methods for developing state of art double layer security crypto-stego systems. Further, a detailed description of commonly using evaluations parameters for both steganography and cryptography, are given in this paper. The paper highlights the pros and cons of the existing image steganography techniques and crypto-stego methods. The purpose of this work is to succinctly review recent progress in the area of information security utilizing combination of cryptography and steganography (crypto-stego) methods for ensuring double layer security for covert communication. Several steganography and cryptographic approaches have been developed so far to ensure data safety during transmission over a network. Additionally, the encryption of data before embedding provides double-layer protection from the potential eavesdropper. Image steganography secures the data by imperceptibly embedding data bits into image pixels with a lesser probability of detection. Image steganography has gained huge attention from researchers for data security. However, interchanging information through the internet raises several security concerns and needs to be addressed. Recent advancement in the digital technology and internet has facilitated usage of multimedia objects for data communication. Besides, the out‐off boundary pixel problem, which endures in most of the contemporary data hiding techniques, has been successfully addressed. In addition, the proposed technique has shown excellent resilience to various stego‐attacks, such as pixel difference histogram as well as regular and singular analysis. The outcome of the proposed technique with respect to perceptual transparency measures, such as peak signal‐to‐noise ratio and structural similarity index, is found to be superior to that of some of the recent and state‐of‐the‐art techniques. Likewise, during extraction, the CI pixels are restored without the loss of a single bit of information. Further, each cover image (CI) pixel produces two different stego‐image pixels. Next, the obtained LBP codes are XORed with the embedding bits and are concealed in the respective blocks using the proposed pixel readjustment process. Then, using the LBP‐based image descriptor, the LBP codes for each block are computed. During embedding, the image is divided into various 3×3 blocks. A novel local binary pattern‐based reversible data hiding (LBP‐RDH) technique has been suggested to maintain a fair symmetry between the perceptual transparency and hiding capacity.

Participants in payload extractor pattern