Novel Hidden Bit Location Method towards JPEG Steganography

Image steganalysis has been widely studied, most of which can only complete the binary task of identifying the existence of hidden bits in an inquiry image. Currently, although some algorithms have been proposed to locate hidden bits, most of them mainly focus on the spatial domain, while usually ignoring the study of locating secret bits hidden in DCT domain for JPEG image. To address that challengeable problem, in this paper, towards two classical steganographic algorithms JSteg and F5, hiding bits in DCT domain, we propose a novel payload location method. The principal step of payload location is to estimate the cover image. We novelly propose to assign the different weights to the DCT coefficient residual in virtue of the texture of regions measured by the local variance, leading to the remarkable improvement of location results. Compared with the state of the art, the numerical experiments empirically verify that our proposed location method achieves the superior performance. In particular, when locating hidden bits in JSteg steganographic images with quality factor of 95 at the payload 0.1, the accuracy of location is remarkably improved from 46.18% to 90.22%.