Steganalysis Based on Multiple Features Formed by Statistical Moments of Wavelet Characteristic Functions

Abstract

In this paper, a steganalysis scheme based on multiple features formed by statistical moments of wavelet characteristic functions is proposed. Our theoretical analysis has pointed out that the defined n-th statistical moment of a wavelet characteristic function is related to the n-th derivative of the corresponding wavelet histogram, and hence is sensitive to data embedding. The selection of the first three moments of the characteristic functions of wavelet subbands of the three-level Haar wavelet decomposition as well as the test image has resulted in total 39 features for steganalysis. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been demonstrated by extensive experimental investigation. The detection rate for Cox et al.’s non-blind spread spectrum (SS) data hiding method, Piva et al.’s blind SS method, Huang and Shi’s 8×8 block SS method, a generic LSB method (as embedding capacity being 0.3 bpp), and a generic QIM method (as embedding capacity being 0.1 bpp) are all above 90% over all of the 1096 images in the CorelDraw image database using the Bayes classifier. Furthermore, when these five typical data hiding methods are jointly considered for steganalysis, i.e., when the proposed steganalysis scheme is first trained sequentially for each of these five methods, and is then tested blindly for stego-images generated by all of these methods, the success classification rate is 86%, thus pointing out a new promising approach to general blind steganalysis. The detection results of steganalysis on Jsteg, Outguess and F5 have further demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed steganalysis scheme.