AI-Powered Steganography: Advances in Image, Linguistic, and 3D Mesh Data Hiding – A Survey

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly transformed the field of steganography, extending its scope beyond conventional image-based techniques to novel domains such as linguistic and 3D mesh data hiding. This review presents a concise, accessible, and critical examination of recent AI-powered steganography methods, focusing on three distinct modalities: image, linguistic, and 3D mesh. Unlike most surveys focusing solely on one modality, this work highlights some modalities, identifies their unique challenges, and discusses how AI has reshaped embedding mechanisms, evaluation strategies, and security concerns. In image-based steganography, deep models such as GANs and Transformers have improved imperceptibility and extraction accuracy, but face limitations in computational efficiency and extraction consistency. Linguistic steganography, previously hindered by semantic fragility, has been revitalized by large language models (LLMs), enabling context-aware and reversible embedding, though still constrained by metric standardization and synchronization issues. Meanwhile, 3D mesh steganography remains dominated by non-AI methods, offering fertile ground for innovation through geometric deep learning. This review also provides a comparative summary of design principles, performance metrics, and modality-specific trade-offs. The analysis reveals a shift in evaluation paradigms, from numeric fidelity (e.g., PSNR, SSIM) to semantic and perceptual metrics (e.g., LPIPS, BERTScore, Hausdorff Distance). Looking ahead, future directions include cross-modal integration, domain adaptation, lightweight AI models, and the development of unified benchmarks. By presenting recent advances and critical perspectives across underexplored domains, this survey aims to inspire early-stage researchers and practitioners to explore new frontiers of steganography in the AI era.