An artificial neural network for wavelet steganalysis

Hiding messages in image data, called steganography, is used for both legal and illicit purposes. The detection of hidden messages in image data stored on websites and computers, called steganalysis, is of prime importance to cyber forensics personnel. Automating the detection of hidden messages is a requirement, since the shear amount of image data stored on computers or websites makes it impossible for a person to investigate each image separately. This paper describes research on a prototype software system that automatically classifies an image as having hidden information or not, using a sophisticated artificial neural network (ANN) system. An ANN software package, the ISU ACL NetWorks Toolkit, is trained on a selection of image features that distinguish between stego and nonstego images. The novelty of this ANN is that it is a blind classifier that gives more accurate results than previous systems. It can detect messages hidden using a variety of different types of embedding algorithms. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) combines the ANN, feature selection, and embedding algorithms into a prototype software package that is not currently available to the cyber forensics community.