Steganalysis of 3D objects using statistics of local feature sets

3D steganalysis aims to identify subtle invisible changes produced in graphical objects through digital watermarking or steganography. Sets of statistical representations of 3D features, extracted from both cover and stego 3D mesh objects, are used as inputs into machine learning classifiers in order to decide whether any information was hidden in the given graphical object. The features proposed in this paper include those representing the local object curvature, vertex normals, the local geometry representation in the spherical coordinate system. The effectiveness of these features is tested in various combinations with other features used for 3D steganalysis. The relevance of each feature for 3D steganalysis is assessed using the Pearson correlation coefficient. Six different 3D watermarking and steganographic methods are used for creating the stego-objects used in the evaluation study

Entropy-based evaluation of context models for wavelet-transformed images

Entropy is a measure of a message uncertainty. Among others aspects, it serves to determine the minimum coding rate that practical systems may attain. This paper defines an entropy-based measure to evaluate context models employed in wavelet-based image coding. The proposed measure is defined considering the mechanisms utilized by modern coding systems. It establishes the maximum performance achievable with each context model. This helps to determine the adequateness of the model under different coding conditions and serves to predict with high precision the coding rate achieved by practical systems. Experimental results evaluate four well-known context models using different types of images, coding rates, and transform strategies. They reveal that, under specific coding conditions, some widely-spread context models may not be as adequate as it is generally thought. The hints provided by this analysis may help to design simpler and more efficient wavelet-based image codecs

Steganalysis of meshes based on 3D wavelet multiresolution analysis

3D steganalysis aims to find the information hidden in 3D models and graphical objects. It is assumed that the information was hidden by 3D steganography or watermarking algorithms. A new set of 3D steganalysis features, derived by using multiresolution 3D wavelet analysis, is proposed in this research study. 3D wavelets relate a given mesh representation with its lower and higher graph resolutions by means of a set of Wavelet Coefficient Vectors (WCVs). The 3D steganalysis features are derived from transformations between a given mesh and its corresponding higher and lower resolutions. They correspond to geometric measures such as ratios and angles between various geometric measures. These features are shown to significantly increase the steganalysis accuracy when detecting watermarks which have been embedded by 3D wavelet-based watermarking algorithms. The proposed features, when used in combination with a previously proposed feature set, is shown to provide the best results in detecting the hidden information embedded by other information hiding algorithms

Image Compression Techniques: A Survey in Lossless and Lossy algorithms

The bandwidth of the communication networks has been increased continuously as results of technological advances. However, the introduction of new services and the expansion of the existing ones have resulted in even higher demand for the bandwidth. This explains the many efforts currently being invested in the area of data compression. The primary goal of these works is to develop techniques of coding information sources such as speech, image and video to reduce the number of bits required to represent a source without significantly degrading its quality. With the large increase in the generation of digital image data, there has been a correspondingly large increase in research activity in the field of image compression. The goal is to represent an image in the fewest number of bits without losing the essential information content within. Images carry three main type of information: redundant, irrelevant, and useful. Redundant information is the deterministic part of the information, which can be reproduced without loss from other information contained in the image. Irrelevant information is the part of information that has enormous details, which are beyond the limit of perceptual significance (i.e., psychovisual redundancy). Useful information, on the other hand, is the part of information, which is neither redundant nor irrelevant. Human usually observes decompressed images. Therefore, their fidelities are subject to the capabilities and limitations of the Human Visual System. This paper provides a survey on various image compression techniques, their limitations, compression rates and highlights current research in medical image compression

Machine learning based digital image forensics and steganalysis

The security and trustworthiness of digital images have become crucial issues due to the simplicity of malicious processing. Therefore, the research on image steganalysis (determining if a given image has secret information hidden inside) and image forensics (determining the origin and authenticity of a given image and revealing the processing history the image has gone through) has become crucial to the digital society. In this dissertation, the steganalysis and forensics of digital images are treated as pattern classification problems so as to make advanced machine learning (ML) methods applicable. Three topics are covered: (1) architectural design of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for steganalysis, (2) statistical feature extraction for camera model classification, and (3) real-world tampering detection and localization. For covert communications, steganography is used to embed secret messages into images by altering pixel values slightly. Since advanced steganography alters the pixel values in the image regions that are hard to be detected, the traditional ML-based steganalytic methods heavily relied on sophisticated manual feature design have been pushed to the limit. To overcome this difficulty, in-depth studies are conducted and reported in this dissertation so as to move the success achieved by the CNNs in computer vision to steganalysis. The outcomes achieved and reported in this dissertation are: (1) a proposed CNN architecture incorporating the domain knowledge of steganography and steganalysis, and (2) ensemble methods of the CNNs for steganalysis. The proposed CNN is currently one of the best classifiers against steganography. Camera model classification from images aims at assigning a given image to its source capturing camera model based on the statistics of image pixel values. For this, two types of statistical features are designed to capture the traces left by in-camera image processing algorithms. The first is Markov transition probabilities modeling block-DCT coefficients for JPEG images; the second is based on histograms of local binary patterns obtained in both the spatial and wavelet domains. The designed features serve as the input to train support vector machines, which have the best classification performance at the time the features are proposed. The last part of this dissertation documents the solutions delivered by the author’s team to The First Image Forensics Challenge organized by the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. In the competition, all the fake images involved were doctored by popular image-editing software to simulate the real-world scenario of tampering detection (determine if a given image has been tampered or not) and localization (determine which pixels have been tampered). In Phase-1 of the Challenge, advanced steganalysis features were successfully migrated to tampering detection. In Phase-2 of the Challenge, an efficient copy-move detector equipped with PatchMatch as a fast approximate nearest neighbor searching method were developed to identify duplicated regions within images. With these tools, the author’s team won the runner-up prizes in both the two phases of the Challenge