Information Hiding - Steganography & Watermarking: A Comparative Study

Abstract

nformation Hiding has emerged as a multidisciplinary field and is getting large support from the research community during the last
two decades. The reason for the tremendous growth in this field is most obvious: to secure the communication, authentication and to provide
copyright protection. Cryptography, alone doesn’t provide security as the communication takes place in presence of 3rd parties and thus message
can easily be decrypted by the intruders. Steganography, Watermarking & Fingerprinting have come up as sub-disciplines of Information
Hiding, and are being employed in many application areas which includes military, defence, market applications, intelligence agencies,
industries, biometrics, banking system and many more. This paper gives an overview on Steganography and Watermarking. The paper concludes
with a brief comparison on Steganography and Watermarking on the basis of some parameters

Key Words: Steganography, Watermarking, Cover Source, Stego File, Watermarked File