Steganography and steganalysis, the hiding and detection of a covert payload within an innocent cover object, started to receive attention from the computer science, engineering, and mathematics communities in the 1990s. At first the problems were not clearly defined, but proper statistical foundations were proposed and mathematical rigour has gradually entered the literature.

After an explosion of interest around the turn of the century, both fields have developed apace, with numerous research papers appearing in proceedings of conferences such as the Information Hiding Workshops and International Workshops on Digital Watermarking, published by Springer, and the ACM Multimedia Security Workshop, SPIE Electronic Imaging, and the new IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security, published by their respective learned societies. There are also new journals dedicated to information hiding topics. But such a wide field is difficult to browse for a reader who is not involved in active research, and this book aims to collect some of the key advances under a common theme. It is suitable for a knowledgable scientist who is not necessarily an expert in information hiding, and it begins with an ab initio exposition of the aims and techniques of steganography and steganalysis. The reader can hope to gain a general understanding of the field as well as of some specific steganalysis techniques.