Steganalysis of AE-LSB steganography based on pixel value differencing

This paper presents a steganalysis technique for detection of adaptive data hiding in edge areas of images with spatial least significant bit (LSB) domain systems (AE-LSB). Pixels in the edge areas which are determined by the difference values of the two consecutive pixels are embedded more secret bits than pixels located in smooth areas. The proposed steganalytic method is designed to exploit the fact that the step artifact happens in the pixel-value differencing (PVD) histograms of the stego-images due to the message embedding using AE-LSB steganography. By analyzing the step artifact in the PVD histograms of the stego-images, the statistical features that can distinguish cover-images from stego-images are obtained. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed scheme has superior performance compared with the prior steganalysis algorithms.