What is the type of obfuscation called when additional information is hidden within an image?

Steganography is the practice of hiding additional information within an image or other media. This technique allows for concealed communication because the presence of the hidden data is not apparent to an observer. In steganography, the main goal is to avoid detection while transmitting a message, as opposed to encryption, which scrambles the data making it unreadable without a key.

In this context, the information is embedded in a way that is undetectable under normal circumstances, effectively camouflaging it within the image itself. For example, alterations to the least significant bits of a pixel can carry secret messages without noticeably affecting the visual appearance of the image.

The other methods listed, such as encryption and hashing, serve different purposes. Encryption transforms data into a secure format, while hashing creates a fixed-size representation of data for integrity verification. Encoding, on the other hand, converts data into a different format for efficient transmission but does not hide information.