Targeted steganalysis of adaptive pixel-value differencing steganography

The adaptive pixel-value differencing steganography proposed by Luo et al. is a state-of-the-art content-adaptive steganographic method which resists blind steganalytic attacks. In this paper, the authors point out that the combination of rotate operation and ternary embedding units in the adaptive pixel-value differencing steganography introduces intrinsic statistical imbalance which can be used to construct a targeted steganalytic algorithm. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can obtain excellent results for detecting stego images even when the embedding rate is low.