Manuscript received February 21, 2024; revised July 4, 2024, accepted July 15, 2024; published February 17, 2025.

Abstract—Image steganography is a science that is interested in how to hide a secret message inside digital images in an imperceptible manner. An attacker listening to communication channel between the two communicating parties will never have any information about the existence of an embedded secret message. After the transmission is completed, the receiver will be able to recover the secret message perfectly. In the other hand, Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) is also a science interested in hiding a secret message in a host image, but the difference between steganography and RDH is that in RDH, the receiver will be able to recover both the secret message and the original host image perfectly without any distortion. In recent years, it is noticed that steganography and RDH have gained a lot of interest because these techniques are widely used in medical images and thermal images that are used in military purposes. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent techniques for steganography and RDH. The paper also discusses different attacks and attempts to recover the payload, which is known as Steganalysis. In addition to basic approaches, an inclusive study on RDH on encrypted and compressed domains was presented. Finally, an evaluation of different techniques on each approach is presented for both steganography, watermarking and RDH.

Keywords—steganography, Reversible Data Hiding (RDH), watermarking, information hiding

Cite: Heba Ragab, Hassan Shaban, Kareem Ahmed, and Abd-Elmgied Ali, "Digital Image Steganography and Reversible Data Hiding: Algorithms, Applications and Recommendations," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 90-114, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.