This book provides an overview of steganography and digital watermarking, two areas of research which are generally referred to as "information hiding." Steganography studies ways to make communication invisible by hiding secrets in innocuous messages, whereas watermarking originated from the need for copyright protection of digital media.

Until recently, information hiding techniques received much less attention from the research community and from industry than cryptography. This situation is, however, changing rapidly and the first academic conference on this topic was organized in 1996. The main driving force is concern over protecting copyright; as audio, video, and other works become available in digital form, the ease with which perfect copies can be made may lead to largescale unauthorized copying, and this is of great concern to the music, film, book, and software publishing industries.

A thorough review of steganography, the history of this previously neglected element of cryptography, a description of possible applications, and a survey of methods you can use to hide information in modern media. DLC: Cryptography.