Machine Learning in Image Steganalysis

Chapter 15

Future of the Field

Reviewing the state of the art in steganalysis, it is reasonable to ask what future the area has. It may be a future within science and research, or it could be as an applied and practical art. It could be both or neither.

Steganalysis no longer enjoys the broad and popular support it did in the first couple of years of the millennium. As we discussed in early chapters, the hard evidence of real steganography users is missing from the public domain. Nevertheless, there are a number of experts, both in industry and academia, who maintain that steganography and steganalysis are important fields with potential for increasing future use. In 2010 we saw the BOSS contest, Break Our Steganographic Scheme (Bas et al., 2011), where a number of groups competed to get the record accuracy for a steganalyser against a particular steganographic system. The subsequent issue of the Information Hiding Workshop (Filler et al., 2011a) contained a large number of solid contributions within the area of steganography and steganalysis not limited to BOSS-related work. Is this showing the return of steganography as a hot topic?

15.1 Image Forensics

A field closely related to image steganalysis is image forensics, and as the steganography hype at the start of the century started to cool, several distinguished individuals and groups in steganalysis changed focus. We can view image steganalysis as a special case of image forensics, which aims to discern as much information ...