Multi-Source Stego Detection with Low-Dimensional Textural Feature and Clustering Ensembles

• Published in: Symmetry (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 5; p. 128
• Main Authors: Li, Fengyong, Wu, Kui, Zhang, Xinpeng, Lei, Jingsheng, Wen, Mi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2018
• Subjects: Cluster analysis; Clustering; clustering ensembles; Digital imaging; Feature extraction; Image processing; image texture feature; multimedia security; steganalysis; steganographer detection; Steganography
• ISSN: 2073-8994; 2073-8994
• DOI: 10.3390/sym10050128

This work tackles a recent challenge in digital image processing: how to identify the steganographic images from a steganographer, who is unknown among multiple innocent actors. The method does not need a large number of samples to train classification model, and thus it is significantly different from the traditional steganalysis. The proposed scheme consists of textural features and clustering ensembles. Local ternary patterns (LTP) are employed to design low-dimensional textural features which are considered to be more sensitive to steganographic changes in texture regions of image. Furthermore, we use the extracted low-dimensional textural features to train a number of hierarchical clustering results, which are integrated as an ensemble based on the majority voting strategy. Finally, the ensemble is used to make optimal decision for suspected image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed scheme is effective and efficient and outperforms the state-of-the-art steganalysis methods with an average gain from 4 % to 6 % .