Towards dependable steganalysis

This paper considers the research goal of dependable steganalysis: where false positives occur once in a million or less, and this rate is known with high precision. Despite its importance for real-world application, there has been almost no study of steganalysis which produces very low false positives. We test existing and novel classifiers for their low false-positive performance, using millions of images from Flickr. Experiments on such a scale require considerable engineering. Standard steganalysis classifiers do not perform well in a low false-positive regime, and we make new proposals to penalise false positives more than false negatives.