A better detection of 2LSB steganography via standard deviation of the extended pairs of values

Abstract

This paper proposes a modification to the Extended Pairs of Values (EPoV) method of 2LSB steganalysis in digital still images. In EPoV, the detection and the estimation of the hidden message length were performed in two separate processes as it considered the automated detection. However, the new proposed method uses the standard deviation of the EPoV to measure the amount of distortion in the stego image made by the embedding process using 2LSB replacement, which is directly proportional with the embedding rate. It is shown that it can accurately estimate the length of the hidden message and outperform the other methods of the targeted 2LSB steganalysis in the literature. The proposed method is also more consistent with the steganalysis methods in the literature by giving the amount of difference to the expected clean image. According to the experimental results, based on analysing 3000 nevercompressed images, the proposed method is more accurate than the current targeted 2LSB steganalysis methods for low embedding rates.