A hybrid feature selection technique based on improved discrete firefly and filter approach for blind image steganalysis

Feature Selection is a preprocessing technique with great significance in data mining applications that aims at reducing computational complexity and increase predictive capability of a learning system. This paper presents a new hybrid feature selection algorithm based on Discrete Firefly optimization technique with dynamic alpha and gamma parameters and t-test filter technique to improve detectability of hidden message for Blind Image Steganalysis. The experiments are conducted on important dataset of feature vectors extracted from frequency domain, Discrete Cosine Transformation and Discrete Wavelet Transformation domain of cover and stego images. The results from popular JPEG steganography algorithms nsF5, Outguess, PQ and JP Hide and Seek show that proposed method is able to identify sensitive features and reduce the feature set by 67% in DCT domain and 37% in DWT domain. The experiment analysis shows that these algorithms are most sensitive to Markov features from DCT domain and variance statistical moment from DWT domain. The results are compared with DPSO (Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization) and well known multivariate feature selection techniques. © 2015, UK Simulation Society. All rights reserved.