Color image steganalysis based on channel gradient correlation

Yuhan Kang,Chunfang Yang,Ping Wang,Xiangyang Luo,Lingyun Xiang,Fenlin Liu

doi:10.1177/1550147719852031

Abstract

It is one of the potential threats to the Internet of Things to reveal confidential messages by color image steganography. The existing color image steganalysis algorithm based on channel geometric transformation measures owns higher accuracy than the others, but it fails to utilize the correlation between the gradient amplitudes of different color channels. Therefore, this article points out that the color image steganography weakens the correlation between the gradient amplitudes of different color channels and proposes a color image steganalysis algorithm based on channel gradient correlation. The proposed algorithm extracts the co-occurrence matrix feature from the gradient amplitude residuals among different color channels and then combines it with the existing color image steganalysis features to train the ensemble classifier for color image steganalysis. The experimental results show that, for WOW and S-UNIWARD steganography, compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms.

Highlights

With the development and popularization of network technology, various image acquisition networks have been widely deployed in many fields, which have become one of the important forms of Internet of Things
Coefficients between the gradient amplitudes of red and blue channels are greater than 0.8484, and only 5.69% color images, for which the correlation coefficients between the gradient amplitudes of red and blue channels are less than 0.7. These results indicate a strong positive correlation between the gradient amplitudes of different color channels
10,000 color images in ‘‘tiff’’ format generated in the above section are used to test the performance of the proposed algorithm and existing color image steganalysis algorithms

Summary

Introduction

With the development and popularization of network technology, various image acquisition networks have been widely deployed in many fields, which have become one of the important forms of Internet of Things. It is possible to maliciously use the steganography to hide sensitive messages into digital images and transmit the images over the Internet, which results in information leakage. The research of digital image steganalysis mainly focuses on steganography detection of a single-color channel. Either for the traditional steganography algorithms,[1,2,3,4] or for the contentadaptive image steganography algorithms developing in recent years,[5,6,7,8] researchers have proposed a series of effective steganalysis algorithms for the single-color channel,[9,10,11,12] and some can even locate or extract the secret messages in the special cases.[13]

Methods

Results

Conclusion