Adaptive steganalysis against WOW embedding algorithm

Abstract

WOW (Wavelet Obtained Weights) [5] is one of the advanced steganographic methods in spatial domain, which can adaptively embed secret message into cover image according to textural complexity. Usually, the more complex of an image region, the more pixel values within it would be modified. In such a way, it can achieve good visual quality of the resulting stegos and high security against typical steganalytic detectors. Based on our analysis, however, we point out one of the limitations in the WOW embedding algorithm, namely, it is easy to narrow down those possible modified regions for a given stego image based on the embedding costs used in WOW. If we just extract features from such regions and perform analysis on them, it is expected that the detection performance would be improved compared with that of extracting steganalytic features from the whole image. In this paper, we first proposed an adaptive steganalytic scheme for the WOW method, and use the spatial rich model (SRM) based features [4] to model those possible modified regions in our experiments. The experimental results evaluated on 10,000 images have shown the effectiveness of our scheme. It is also noted that our steganalytic strategy can be combined with other steganalytic features to detect the WOW and/or other adaptive steganographic methods both in the spatial and JPEG domains.