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A novel blind detector for additive noise steganography in JPEG decompressed images

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel universal steganalyzer for additive noise steganography in JPEG decompressed images. On the basis of the influence of the message embedding on the statistical distributions of alternating current (ac) discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients, we first develop a new steganalytic feature which is defined as the ratio between different ranges of the normalized ac coefficients histogram. Then a powerful blind detector is constructed with the proposed one-dimensional (1-D) feature. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed steganalyzer outperforms the existing state-of-the-art schemes significantly and even can detect the additive noise steganography effectively at a very low embedding rate. In addition, our method using a 1-D feature is not only practical and real-time, but also can provide a better control of the false positive rate and the false negative rate by adjusting the detection threshold. Moreover, the proposed feature can also be used to identify JPEG compression besides steganalysis, which indicates that our method has a great promise in practical applications.

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Abbreviations

ac:

Alternating current

DCT:

Discrete cosine transform

1-D:

One-dimensional

LSB:

Least significant bit

SSIS:

Spread spectrum image steganography

SM:

Stochastic modulation

RS:

Regular and singular

AHCF-COM:

The center of the mass of the adjacency histogram characteristic function

ALE:

The amplitude of local extrema

CAM:

Central absolute moment

WAM:

Wavelet absolute moments

SPAM2nd:

The second subtractive pixel adjacency matrix

bpp:

Bit per pixel

pdf:

Probability density function

pmf:

Probability mass function

ROC:

Receiver operation characteristic

SVM:

Support vector machine

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60903221). The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, 450002, Henan, China

    Xing Li, Tao Zhang, Wenxiang Li & Kaida Li

  2. Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou, 450002, Henan, China

    Yan Zhang

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  1. Xing Li
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  2. Tao Zhang
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  3. Yan Zhang
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  4. Wenxiang Li
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  5. Kaida Li
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Correspondence to Xing Li.

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Li, X., Zhang, T., Zhang, Y. et al. A novel blind detector for additive noise steganography in JPEG decompressed images. Multimed Tools Appl 68, 1051–1068 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1112-2

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