Blind steganalysis-driven secure transmission validation using feature-based classification in JPEG images
Deepa D. Shankar, Adresya Suresh Azhakath · Intelligent Systems with Applications · 2025
• Information technology and digital media have significantly improved in recent years, facilitating the internet as an effective channel for communication and data transmission. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement of technology has rendered the data a source of mismanagement and vulnerable to exploitation. Consequently, technologies such as data concealment were devised to mitigate exploitation. Steganalysis is a technique for data concealment. Various processes, including breaches of information security, can be mitigated by steganalysis. This work aims to encapsulate the notion of blind statistical steganalysis within image processing methodologies and ascertain the accuracy percentage of secure transmission. This work discusses the extraction of features that indicate a change during embedding. A specific percentage of text is integrated into a JPEG image of a predetermined size. The text embedding utilises various steganographic techniques in both the spatial and transform domains. The steganographic techniques include LSB Matching, LSB Replacement, Pixel Value Differencing, and F5. Due to the blind nature of steganalysis, there are no cover images available for comparative analysis. An estimation of the cover image is obtained by a calibration concept. Subsequent to embedding, the images are partitioned into 8 × 8 blocks, from which certain features are extraction for classification. This paper utilises interblock dependent features and intrablock dependent features. Both dependencies are regarded as means to mitigate the shortcomings of each individually. The approach of machine learning is employed using a classifier to distinguish between the stego image and the cover image. This research does a comparative investigation of the classifiers SVM and SVM-PSO. Comparative research is frequently performed both with and without use cross-validation methodology. The study incorporates the concept of cross-validation for comparative analysis. There are six unique kernel functions and four sample methods for grouping. The embedding ratio employed in this investigation is 50%. Information technology and digital media have significantly improved in recent years, facilitating the internet as an effective channel for communication and data transmission. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement of technology has rendered data a source of mismanagement and vulnerable to exploitation. Consequently, technologies such as data concealment were devised to mitigate exploitation. Steganalysis is a technique for data concealment. Various processes, including breaches of information security, can be mitigated by steganalysis. This work aims to encapsulate the notion of blind statistical steganalysis within image processing methodologies and ascertain the accuracy percentage of secure transmission. This work discusses the extraction of features that indicate a change during embedding. A specific percentage of text is integrated into a JPEG image of a predetermined size. The text embedding utilizes various steganographic techniques in both the spatial and transform domains. The steganographic techniques include LSB Matching, LSB Replacement, Pixel Value Differencing, and F5. Due to the blind nature of steganalysis, there are no cover images available for comparative analysis. An estimation of the cover image is obtained by a calibration concept. After embedding, the images are partitioned into 8 × 8 blocks, from which certain features are extraction for classification. This paper utilizes interblock dependent features and intrablock dependent features. Both dependencies are regarded as means to mitigate the shortcomings of each individually. The approach of machine learning is employed using a classifier to distinguish between the stego image and the cover image. This research does a comparative investigation of the classifiers SVM and SVM-PSO. Comparative research is frequently performed both with and without use cross-validation methodology. The study incorporates the concept of cross-validation for comparative analysis. There are six unique kernel functions and four sample methods for grouping. The embedding ratio employed in this investigation is 50%.