A Review and Analysis of Steganography and Visual Cryptography for Secure Data Hiding

Security of the secret information has been a challenge when the huge volume of data is exchanged on the internet. Steganography is one of the technique used for concealing information inside an image. Cryptography is a technique which converts the data or plain text into an unreadable form. Visual secret sharing is the technique that divide the secret image into n several shares. Each share holds some information and when the shares are superimposed, a hidden secret image is revealed. It is totally different from the traditional cryptography, because for decrypting the secret image, it does not require any complex computation. The advantage of visual cryptography is that if any one captures a share then single share would not disclose anything about the data. This paper presents a review on various Steganography and visual cryptography techniques that is employed for information concealing. The main objective is to find out a method, which can conceal a large quantity of data in image.