The idea of secretly sending information has seen its importance as old as the communication evolved itself. Steganography is nothing but to embed the secret information in an image, audio or in a video. The sensitive image that contains the secret information is called the stego-image. This information hiding makes sure that only the sender and receiver can suspect the existence of secret information in the image. The main advantage of the steganographic technique is that the secret information does not draw attention (remains subtle). In this way the hidden information is highly secured. Shannon-FanoElias is one technique of embedding the secret information where the embedding of secret string is done by generating a code word for each character in a string. By this technique high degree of data encryption is made possible. In order to make sure that the stego images are not being easily intruded, a check of the quality of stego images is done by calculating the Peak Signal To Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Square Error (MSE). This paper provides a simple avant-garde review and the various analysis of the Shannon-Fano-Elias algorithm with some standards and general rules unfolded from various analysis.

Keywords: Steganography, Steganalysis, Cipher text, Code word, Arithmetic coding