Performance study of common image steganography and steganalysis techniques

We investigate the performance of state of the art universal steganalyzers proposed in the literature. These universal steganalyzers are tested against a number of well-known steganographic embedding techniques that operate in both the spatial and transform domains. Our experiments are performed using a large data set of JPEG images obtained by randomly crawling a set of publicly available websites. The image data set is categorized with respect to size, quality, and texture to determine their potential impact on steganalysis performance. To establish a comparative evaluation of techniques, undetectability results are obtained at various embedding rates. In addition to variation in cover image properties, our comparison also takes into consideration different message length definitions and computational complexity issues. Our results indicate that the performance of steganalysis techniques is affected by the JPEG quality factor, and JPEG recompression artifacts serve as a source of confusion for almost all steganalysis techniques. © 2006 SPIE and IS&T. DOI: 10.1117/1.2400672