Rich Models for Steganalysis of Digital Images

Abstract

We describe a novel general strategy for building steganography detectors for digital images. The process starts with assembling a rich model of the noise component as a union of many diverse submodels formed by joint distributions of neighboring samples from quantized image noise residuals obtained using linear and nonlinear high-pass filters. In contrast to previous approaches, we make the model assembly a part of the training process driven by samples drawn from the corresponding cover- and stego-sources. Ensemble classifiers are used to assemble the model as well as the final steganalyzer due to their low computational complexity and ability to efficiently work with high-dimensional feature spaces and large training sets. We demonstrate the proposed framework on three steganographic algorithms designed to hide messages in images represented in the spatial domain: HUGO, edge-adaptive algorithm by Luo <etal xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> <citerefgrp xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <citeref refid="ref32"/></citerefgrp> , and optimally coded ternary <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\pm {\hbox{1}}$</tex></formula> embedding. For each algorithm, we apply a simple submodel-selection technique to increase the detection accuracy per model dimensionality and show how the detection saturates with increasing complexity of the rich model. By observing the differences between how different submodels engage in detection, an interesting interplay between the embedding and detection is revealed. Steganalysis built around rich image models combined with ensemble classifiers is a promising direction towards automatizing steganalysis for a wide spectrum of steganographic schemes.