Unsupervised universal steganalyzer for high-dimensional steganalytic features
Xiaodan Hou, Tao Zhang · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2016
The research in developing steganalytic features has been highly successful. These features are extremely powerful when applied to supervised binary classification problems. However, they are incompatible with unsupervised universal steganalysis because the unsupervised method cannot distinguish embedding distortion from varying levels of noises caused by cover variation. This study attempts to alleviate the problem by introducing similarity retrieval of image statistical properties (SRISP), with the specific aim of mitigating the effect of cover variation on the existing steganalytic features. First, cover images with some statistical properties similar to those of a given test image are searched from a retrieval cover database to establish an aided sample set. Then, unsupervised outlier detection is performed on a test set composed of the given test image and its aided sample set to determine the type (cover or stego) of the given test image. Our proposed framework, called SRISP-aided unsupervised outlier detection, requires no training. Thus, it does not suffer from model mismatch mess. Compared with prior unsupervised outlier detectors that do not consider SRISP, the proposed framework not only retains the universality but also exhibits superior performance when applied to high-dimensional steganalytic features.