Strategy to improve the accuracy of convolutional neural network architectures applied to digital image steganalysis in the spatial domain

In recent years, Deep Learning techniques applied to steganalysis have surpassed the traditional two-stage approach by unifying feature extraction and classification in a single model, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Several CNN architectures have been proposed to solve this task, improving steganographic images’ detection accuracy, but it is unclear which computational elements are relevant. Here we present a strategy to improve accuracy, convergence, and stability during training. The strategy involves a preprocessing stage with Spatial Rich Models filters, Spatial Dropout, Absolute Value layer, and Batch Normalization. Using the strategy improves the performance of three steganalysis CNNs and two image classification CNNs by enhancing the accuracy from 2% up to 10% while reducing the training time to less than 6 h and improving the networks’ stability.