JPEG Steganalysis Based on DenseNet

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel DenseNet-based CNN architecture for JPEG steganalysis that improves detection accuracy and robustness, and combines deep learning with traditional methods to further reduce detection errors.

Contribution

It proposes a 32-layer DenseNet-inspired CNN with feature reuse and an ensemble method combining CNN and conventional techniques in the JPEG domain, achieving superior performance.

Findings

Reduces detection error rate by 5.67% on BOSSbase for 0.1 bpnzAC

Decreases CNN training parameters to 17% of XuNet

Enhances detection robustness across multiple datasets

Abstract

Different from the conventional deep learning work based on an images content in computer vision, deep steganalysis is an art to detect the secret information embedded in an image via deep learning, pose challenge of detection weak information invisible hidden in a host image thus learning in a very low signal-to-noise (SNR) case. In this paper, we propose a 32- layer convolutional neural Networks (CNNs) in to improve the efficiency of preprocess and reuse the features by concatenating all features from the previous layers with the same feature- map size, thus improve the flow of information and gradient. The shared features and bottleneck layers further improve the feature propagation and reduce the CNN model parameters dramatically. Experimental results on the BOSSbase, BOWS2 and ImageNet datasets have showed that the proposed CNN architecture can improve the performance and enhance the robustness. To further boost the detection accuracy, an ensemble architecture called as CNN-SCA-GFR is proposed, CNN-SCA- GFR is also the first work to combine the CNN architecture and conventional method in the JPEG domain. Experiments show that it can further lower detection errors. Compared with the state-of-the-art method XuNet [1] on BOSSbase, the proposed CNN-SCA-GFR architecture can reduce detection error rate by 5.67% for 0.1 bpnzAC and by 4.41% for 0.4 bpnzAC while the number of training parameters in CNN is only 17% of what used by XuNet. It also decreases the detection errors from the conventional method SCA-GFR by 7.89% for 0.1 bpnzAC and 8.06% for 0.4 bpnzAC, respectively.