Image Sterilization to Prevent LSB-based Steganographic Transmission

Sterilization is a very popular word used in biomedical testing (like removal of all microorganisms on surface of an article or in fluid using appropriate chemical products). Motivated by this biological analogy, we, for the first time, introduce the concept of sterilization of an image, i.e., removing any steganographic information embedded in the image. Experimental results show that our technique succeeded in sterilizing around 76% to 91% of stego pixels in an image on average, where data is embedded using LSB-based steganography.