  The need to protect sensitive information privacy duringinformation exchange
over the internet/intranet has led towider adoption of cryptography and
steganography. The cryptography approaches convert the information into an
unreadable format however draws the attention of cryptanalyst owing to the
uncommon random nature flow of the bytes when viewing the flowing structured
bytes on a computer. While steganography, in contrast, conceals the very
existence of covert communication using digital media. Although any digital
media (text, image, video, audio) can covey the sensitive information, the
media with higher redundant bits are more favorable for embedding the sensitive
information without distorting the media. Digital images are majorly used in
conveying sensitive information compared to others owing to their higher rate
of tolerating distortions, highly available, smaller sizes with high redundant
bits. However, the need for maximizing the redundancy bits for the optimum
embedding of secret information has been a paramount issue due to the
imperceptibility prerequisite which deteriorates with an increase in payload
thus, resulting in a tradeoff. This has limited steganography to only
applications with lower payload requirements, thus limiting the adoption for
wider deployment. This paper critically analyzes the current steganographic
techniques, recent trends, and challenges.
