Steganalysis via deep residual network

Recent studies have demonstrated that a well designed deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model achieves competitive performances on detecting the presence of secret message in digital images, compared with the classical rich model based steganalysis. In this paper, we propose to investigate a category of very deep CNN model-the deep residual network (DRN), for steganalysis. DRN is suitable for steganalysis from two aspects. For the first, the DRN model usually contains a large number of network layers, which proves to be effective to capture the complex statistics of digital images. For the second, DRN's residual learning (ResL) method actively strengthens the signal coming from secret messages, which is extremely beneficial for the discrimination between cover images and stego images. Comprehensive experiments on standard dataset show that the DRN model achieves very low detection error rates for the state of arts steganographic algorithms. It also outperforms the classical rich model method and several recently proposed CNN based methods.