Detection of LSB Matching Revisited Using Pixel Difference Feature

This paper presents a detection method for least significant bit matching revisited (LSBMR) steganography. Previous research shows that the adjacent pixels of natural images are highly correlated and the value 0 appears most frequently in pixel difference. Considering that the message embedding process of LSBMR steganography has a weighted-smoothing effect on the distribution of pixel difference, the frequency of the occurrence of value 0 in pixel difference changes most significantly whereas other values approximately remain unchanged during message embedding. By analyzing the effect of LSBMR steganography on pixel difference distribution, an equation is deduced to estimate the frequency of difference value 0 using the frequencies of difference values 1 and 2. The sum of the ratio of the estimated value to the actual value as well as the ratio of the frequency of difference value 1 to difference value 0 is used as the steganalytic detector. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect LSBMR steganography and can outperform previous proposed methods.