Color images steganalysis using rgb channel geometric transformation measures

Abstract : In recent years, information security has received a great deal of attention. To give an example, steganography techniques are used to communicate in a secret and invisible way. Digital color images have become a good medium for digital steganography because of their easy manipulation as carriers via Internet, e-mails, or used on websites. The main goal of steganalysis is to detect the presence of hidden messages in a digital media. The proposed method is a further extension of the authors' previous work: steganalysis based on color feature correlation and machine learning classification. Fusing features with those obtained from color-rich models allows increasing the detectability of hidden messages in the color images. Our new proposition uses two types of features, computed between color image channels. The first type of feature reflects local Euclidean transformations, and the second one reflects mirror transformations. These geometric measures are obtained by the sine and cosine of gradient angles between all the color channels. Features are extracted from co-occurrence correlation matrices of measures. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework on three steganography algorithms designed to hide messages in images represented in the spatial domain: S-UNIWARD, WOW, and Synch-HILL. For each algorithm, we applied a range of different payload sizes. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by the comparison with the previous authors work and the spatial color-rich model and color filter array-aware features for steganalysis.