A Critical Survey on Video Steganography: Trends, Pitfalls, and Recommendations
Abstract
Video is an ideal medium for covert communication due to its traffic volume and the many possible embedding domains offered by motion-compensated compression. This review of 30 years of video steganography research, including steganalysis and deep learning approaches, proposes a unified taxonomy and uses it to map developments across 347 sources. Many of these sources simply apply image steganography to video, and only a few critically evaluate security. The review identifies connections between these papers and highlights common pitfalls that hinder comparability. The state-of-the-art is characterized by a discussion of selected landmark papers in each embedding domain, followed by recommendations for future work.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Publication details
- Journal / source
- ACM Computing Surveys
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1–35
- Publication date
- 16 March 2026
- Language
- EN