Quantitative steganalysis using rich models

In this paper, we propose a regression framework for steganalysis of digital images that utilizes the recently proposed rich models – high-dimensional statistical image descriptors that have been shown to substantially improve classical (binary) steganalysis. Our proposed system is based on gradient boosting and utilizes a steganalysis-specific variant of regression trees as base learners. The conducted experiments confirm that the proposed system outperforms prior quantitative steganalysis (both structural and feature-based) across a wide range of steganographic schemes: HUGO, LSB replacement, nsF5, BCHopt, and MME3.