How to Describe New Steganographic Techniques (Hiding Methods)

Typically, a researcher who discovers a new way for data hiding implements her/his new method, tests it, and, finally, describes the new method in a scientific paper.

However, until now hiding methods in steganography have been described in arbitrary ways, making them difficult to compare. For instance, some publications describe classical channel characteristics, such as robustness and bandwidth, while others describe the embedding of hidden information.

Under the umbrella of this project, we introduced the first unified description of hiding methods in steganography (Wendzel et al., 2016). While the original scope of this paper was on network steganography, it can essentially be applied to all domains of steganography. To this end, the original version of the unified description method was adjusted to fit all domains of steganography in our 2022 taxonomy paper Wendzel et al., 2022, see Section IX of the paper for a tutorial and examples.

When our description method is applied by the research community, future publications will be easier to categorize, compare and extend. Our method can also serve as a basis to evaluate the novelty of hiding methods proposed in the future.

References

Examples

Multiple papers exist, where the unified description method was applied, but here is one recent one that is open access: