Adaptive Steganalysis Based on Statistical Model of Quantized DCT Coefficients for JPEG Images

Abstract

In current steganalysis, relying on a large scale of samples, widely-adopted supervised schemes require the training stage while few studies focus on the design of a training-free unsupervised adaptive detector with high efficiency. To fill the gap, we investigate an adaptive statistical model-based detector designed for detecting JPEG steganography. First, in virtue of hypothesis testing theory, together with the distribution of quantized DCT coefficients, we establish the general framework of the statistical model-based detector. Second, based on the framework, we mainly analyze the performance of the detector relying on the selection of the statistical model, parameters estimation, and less significant payload prediction. Third, to improve the reliability of detection, based on the strategy of assigning weights for DCT channels, the novel adaptive statistical model-based detectors are proposed to aim at detecting JPEG steganography, involving the channel-selected or non-channel-selected algorithm. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Moreover, when detecting JPEG images adopted by two steganographic schemes with the small payload, the experimental results show the Area Under Curve (AUC) of our proposed optimal adaptive detector can achieve as high as 0.9567 and 0.9895 respectively, which are both better than that of non-adaptive detector.