Steganalysis of adaptive JPEG steganography by selecting DCT coefficients according to embedding distortion

According to the characteristics of adaptive JPEG steganography which determines the changed DCT coefficients based on embedding distortion, a new steganalysis method by selecting the DCT coefficients with small distortion values is proposed. Firstly, the principle of adaptive JPEG steganography through minimizing distortion is introduced. Secondly, the practicability of selecting the changed DCT coefficients according to distortion values is studied. Thirdly, the proposed steganalysis method is given and the embedding sensitivity of the steganalysis feature extracted from the selected DCT coefficients is analyzed. Lastly, the implement processes of the proposed method are presented and analyzed in details. In the experiments, PQt, PQe and J-UNIWARD steganography are used as examples to verify the effect of the proposed steganalysis method for adaptive JPEG steganography. A serial experimental results show the detection accuracy can be improved obviously, especially when the payload is relatively low.