A novel technique for image steganalysis based on separable convolution and adversarial mechanism

Abstract

Image steganalysis is a technique for detecting the presence of hidden information in images, which has profound significance for maintaining cyberspace security. In recent years, various deep steganalysis networks have been proposed in academia, and have achieved good detection performance. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can effectively extract the features describing the image content, the difficulty lies in extracting the subtle features that describe the existence of hidden information. Considering this concern, this paper introduces separable convolution and adversarial mechanism, and proposes a new network structure that effectively solves the problem. The separable convolution maximizes the residual information by utilizing its channel correlation. The adversarial mechanism makes the generator extract more content features to mislead the discriminator, thus separating more steganographic features. We conducted experiments on BOSSBase1.01 and BOWS2 to detect various adaptive steganography algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our method extracts the steganographic features effectively. The separable convolution increases the signal-to-noise ratio, maximizes the channel correlation of residuals, and improves efficiency. The adversarial mechanism can separate more steganographic features, effectively improving the performance. Compared with the traditional steganalysis methods based on deep learning, our method shows obvious improvements in both detection performance and training efficiency.