Steganalysis of Block-DCT

Image Steganography
Ying Wang and Pierre Moulin

Beckman Institute, CSL & ECE Department

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
September 29th, 2003
 Introduction
• Steganography is a branch of information hiding,
aiming to achieve perfectly secret communication.

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Steganographer vs. Steganalyzer

Steganographer Steganalyzer

• Embedding distortion De • Trace of embedding?

– Is X N typical of PS ?
N

• Various embedding • Detection methods

methods can be used. – Ad hoc
– Detection-theoretic

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 Block-DCT Embedding
Spatial domain DCT domain

• Host image: u(m,n) • 8 8 -DCT coefficients:

u~ (k , l )

• 2-D stationary process • 64 equal-size channels

with 0 mean and containing approximately
correlation function independent data, with
variances  u~2 (k , l )
ru ( s, t )  E[u (m, n)u (m  s, n  t )]

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 Spatial domain DCT domain
8 8

u ( m, n )
8 u~ (k , l )

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 Modified Spread Spectrum Data
Hiding Model
DCT domain Spatial domain

• Marked DCT coefficients: • Stego-image:

u~(k , l )  v~ (k , l )  ~
z (k , l ) u (m, n)  v(m, n)  z (m, n)

~ ~  
IDCT

a (k , l )u (k , l ) v(m, n)
a~k ,l u~ (k , l ) N (0,  ~z2 (k , l )) 
DCT

~  
IDCT

• Constraint De and 1-D z (k , l ) z (m, n)


undetectability constraint: DCT

pu~ ( k ,l )  pu~( k ,l ) , k , l . vz

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Statistics of the Pixel Differences

• Block processing
introduces discontinuity at
the block boundaries

• Develop steganalysis
method based on pixel
differences!

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 Host image Stego-image

• d (m, n)  u ( m, n)  u (m, n  1) • d (m, n)  u (m, n)  u(m, n  1)

is a stationary process with is non-stationary
zero mean and correlation
function
rd (k , l )  E[d m ,n d m  k ,n l ]
 2ru (k , l )  ru (k , l  1)  ru (k , l  1)

• The pdfs for all pairs are • The pdfs for inner pairs {d 0 }
the same and border pairs {d1} are
different

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Binary Hypothesis Testing Problem

 H 0 : F0  F1
• Two populations • K-S test: 
 H1 : F0  F1
{d 0 } {d1}
F0 and F1 are cumulative
• Difficulty: pdfs are unknown! density functions.

• We use non-parametric • Test statistic:

two-sample goodness-of-fit DM , N  sup S 0 ( x)  S1 ( x)
tests such as Komogorov- x

Smirnov (K-S) test. S 0 ( x) #  d 0 (m, n)  x / M


 S1 ( x) #  d1(m, n)  x / N

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• The decision rule with PFA  
is
 1 DM , N  DM , N ,

 D   0 DM , N  DM , N , .
0 / 1 DM , N  DM , N ,


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 Discussion
• With the same embedding strength, stego-images
of smooth host images such as Lena and Jet, are
more likely to be detected than those of images
with noise-like textures, such as Baboon.

– The best candidates for steganography are complex

images such as Baboon.

– Block-DCT steganography is not suitable for smooth

images.

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• The key idea of our paper is to find an intrinsic
property of natural images, which is modified by the
information hiding process.

– Another example: detecting wavelet-based information

hiding. Upsampling introduces a stationary process in
one subband to a non-stationary process in the spatial
domain.

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• The K-S test is universal in the sense that the pdfs
can be unknown.

• Comparing the K-S test with the likelihood ratio

test, their universality is achieved at the cost of
performance degradation.

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 References
• N. F. Johnson and S. Katzenbeisser, ``A survey of
steganographic techniques", in S. Katzenbeisser and F.
Peticolas (Eds.): Information Hiding, pp.43-78. Artech House,
Norwood, MA, 2000.

• J. D. Gibbons and S. Chakraborti, Nonparametric statistical

inference, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1992.

• L. Breiman, Probability, SIAM, Philadelphia, 1992.

• O. Dabeer, K. Sullivan, U. Madhow, S. Chandrasekharan, and

B. S. Manjunath, ``Detection of hiding in the least significant
bit", Proc. CISS, The Johns Hopkins University, Mar. 2003.

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Lena Baboon

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