Blind steganalysis for JPEG images using SVM and SVM-PSO classifiers

Abstract

Blind steganalysis or the universal steganalysis helps to identify hidden information without previous knowledge of the content or the embedding technique. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) and SVM-Particle Swarm Optimization (SVM-PSO) classifiers are adopted for the proposed blind steganalysis. The important features of the JPEG images are extracted using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The kernel functions used for the classifiers in the proposed work are the linear, epanechnikov, multi-quadratic, radial, ANOVA and polynomial. The proposed work uses linear, shuffle, stratified and automatic sampling techniques. The proposed work employs four techniques for image embedding namely, Least Significant Bit (LSB) Matching, LSB replacement, Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) and F5 and applies 25% embedding. The data to the classifier is split as 80:20 for training and testing and 10-fold cross validation is carried out.