ASurvey on Reversible Data Hiding Techniques

There is a perpetual requirement for secure data communication in order to transmit a message over a shaky network prone to various attacks. Steganography, which provides a means of cover writing, is effective in hiding sensitive data by embedding them in host images which can be reversibly extracted. Steganography schemes also based on Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are applicable on spatial domain exclusively. Public key cryptography in Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) imparts double layer security to sensitive images. An overview of various such reversible data hiding techniques are discussed in this paper which throws light on the recent research works in this domain. The application areas of RDH are put forward. The paper concludes by summarizing the studies on different proposed methods. The paper ends with delivering a direction to the future work which gives scope of improvement to existing methodologies.