IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY: REVIEW STUDY Haval Muhammed Sidqi 1 , MuzhirShaban Al-Ani 2 1. INTRODUCTION The idea of data hiding is early technique which is traced back to a thousand years ago. It is merely based on dimming messages content by a process called encryption, which is sometimes not practically effective. In many competitive cases, it is highly demanded to suppress the initial existence of a communication in order to avoid suspicion from adversaries [3].Steganography is the art and science of hidden communication by embedding a message into an safe looking cover media such as text, image, and video. In steganography, hidden writing is established for two main reasons: safety against detection (data hiding) and safety against removal. In these review papers, information is hidden within a host data set and is to be reliably communicated to a receiver. Mainly, steganography considers methods and techniques that can create covert communication channels for unobtrusive transmission for military purposes. Steganography is also used for automatic monitoring of radio advertisements, indexing of video mail (to embed comments) and medical imaging (to embed information like patient and physician names, DNA sequences and other particulars)[3]. Other applications include: smart video-audio synchronization, secure and invisible storage of confidential information, identity cards (to embed individuals details) and checksum embedding [12]. Recently, the information hiding methods have become main practice in a wide areas and applications, including digital audio, video, and pictures which are equipped dramaticallywith imperceptible marks that possibly contain a hidden copyright notice, and a serial number, or even have the ability to directly assist in preventing an unauthorized copying process. The military communications systems employ a high level of traffic security techniques which instead of just hiding the message content by the encryption process; it findsto conceal the message sender, and its receiver, or even its very existence [14]. The "information hiding" term is linked to both steganography and digital watermarking. The steganographyis defined as the attempt to hide the fact that informationis being transmitted at the first place, while watermarkingis usually referred to the involved methods by which an identified information is being hidden in a data object, and accordingly, the information will be kept robust against modification[15]. Steganography is considered as a kind of a hidden communication which means literally the “covered writing”. Originally, it has been derived from the two Greek words stegano which refers to “covered” and secret massage which refers to “to write”. The goal of applying the steganography is to hide the information message inside a harmless cover medium by a certain way that makes it impossible to detect the secret information and even its existence in the cover medium [16]. Data hiding is a form of steganography that works by embedding data into digital media for the purpose ofidentification, annotation, and copyrighting. In fact, severalmanacles affect such a process and this is 1 University ofSulaimani Polytechnic, Institute of Computer, Department of Database, KRG Iraq 2 University of Human Development, College of Science and Technology, Department of Information Technology,Sulaimania,KRG Iraq International Journal of Latest Trends in Engineering and Technology Vol.(13)Issue(2), pp.027-034 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21172/1.132.05 e-ISSN:2278-621X Abstract- The evolving of Internet technology has achieved to the need of high level of data safety during its spread. For this purpose steganography shows a main role in society. Steganography is mostly the art of secretly hiding data or message in any cover media such as an image, audio or video. Hence it allows secret communiqué to take place without the information of any unintended user. This article gives a brief overview of image steganography and the techniques used for hiding data in the original image to get stego-image. The estimate of performance is based on the PSNR value.The aim of Steganography is to maintain secret communication between two events. This paper shows how Steganography is used in a new situation while providing a practical understanding of what Steganography is and how to complete it. In this research there exists a large change of steganographic techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different techniques have different requirements of the steganography method used. After studying and analyzing of the research papers, the following gaps are identified:1)theessential of multi-level key security with random key generation is arises so that the data security will become more robust.2)The length of the key should be maximized up to 256 to 512 bytes. 3)The grouping of cryptography with steganography is a stronger way to enhance the security.4)The uses of steganography ways with the help of image encryption enhance the retrieval complexity.This paperpresents a relative study of many procedure steganalysis techniques. It investigated and compared the performances of each technique in the detection of embedding methods considered. Based on the results of our analysis, this paper provides information as to which specific steganalysis technique needs to be used for a particular steganography method. Finally, we suggest a procedure which may help a legal examiner to agree an order in which different steganalysis methods need to be measured in the detection process to complete the best finding results in terms of together time and accuracy. Keywords: Security; Information Hiding; Steganography; Stego-image.