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Universal secret payload location identification in spatial LSB stego images

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Abstract

Locating steganographic payload is an important aspect of active steganalysis which deals with finding the pixel locations of the embedded secret message (payload) in the stego image. The residual-based payload location detectors are well suited for this purpose. In this paper, an improved universal, blind method of precisely identifying locations in the spatial domain using enhanced weighted residuals with only a few known stego images is proposed. This is done by estimating the cover from the available stego image using the proposed novel locally weighted bivariate shrinkage function in the transform domain. The enhanced weighted residuals ensure that the proposed method is universally applicable for detecting payload locations in spatial least significant bit stego images. The added advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require any prior knowledge of the cover source or the embedding algorithm to determine the exact locations. Experiments conducted on five spatial LSB domain algorithms show that the payload locations can be precisely estimated with a minimum accuracy of 90% with 100 known stego images.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the Management and Principal of MSEC and KCET for providing the necessary facilities and support to carry out this research work. The authors would also like to thank Mrs. Ramya and Mrs. Sylvia for meticulously proofreading this research article and providing valuable inputs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, India

    S. T. Veena

  2. Centre for Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, Department of Electronics and Communication, Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Mepco Nagar, Amathur Post, Sivakasi, Tamilnadu, India

    S. Arivazhagan

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  1. S. T. Veena
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  2. S. Arivazhagan
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Correspondence to S. T. Veena.

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Veena, S.T., Arivazhagan, S. Universal secret payload location identification in spatial LSB stego images. Ann. Telecommun. 74, 273–286 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-018-0676-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-018-0676-x

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