Steganography detectors built as deep convolutional neural networks have firmly established themselves as superior to the previous detection paradigm – classifiers based on rich media models. Existing network architectures, however, still contain elements designed by hand, such as fixed or constrained convolutional kernels, heuristic initialization of kernels, the thresholded linear unit that mimics truncation in rich models, quantization of feature maps, and awareness of JPEG phase. In this work, we describe a deep residual architecture designed to minimize the use of heuristics and externally enforced elements that is universal in the sense that it provides state-of-the-art detection accuracy for both spatial-domain and JPEG steganography. The key part of the proposed architecture is a significantly expanded front part of the detector that “computes noise residuals” in which pooling has been disabled to prevent suppression of the stego signal. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of this network with a significant improvement, especially in the JPEG domain. Further performance boost is observed by supplying the selection channel as a second channel.

Deep Residual Network for Steganalysis of Digital Images

With recent advances in computer vision and graphics, it is now possible to generate videos with extremely realistic synthetic faces, even in real time. Countless applications are possible, some of which raise a legitimate alarm, calling for reliable detectors of fake videos. In fact, distinguishing between original and manipulated video can be a challenge for humans and computers alike, especially when the videos are compressed or have low resolution, as it often happens on social networks. Research on the detection of face manipulations has been seriously hampered by the lack of adequate datasets. To this end, we introduce a novel face manipulation dataset of about half a million edited images (from over 1000 videos). The manipulations have been generated with a state-of-the-art face editing approach. It exceeds all existing video manipulation datasets by at least an order of magnitude. Using our new dataset, we introduce benchmarks for classical image forensic tasks, including classification and segmentation, considering videos compressed at various quality levels. In addition, we introduce a benchmark evaluation for creating indistinguishable forgeries with known ground truth; for instance with generative refinement models.

FaceForensics: A Large-scale Video Dataset for Forgery Detection in Human Faces

Local descriptors based on the image noise residual have proven extremely effective for a number of forensic applications, like forgery detection and localization. Nonetheless, motivated by promising results in computer vision, the focus of the research community is now shifting on deep learning. In this paper we show that a class of residual-based descriptors can be actually regarded as a simple constrained convolutional neural network (CNN). Then, by relaxing the constraints, and fine-tuning the net on a relatively small training set, we obtain a significant performance improvement with respect to the conventional detector.

Recasting Residual-based Local Descriptors as Convolutional Neural Networks: an Application to Image Forgery Detection

With the rapid progress of recent years, techniques that generate and manipulate multimedia content can now guarantee a very advanced level of realism. The boundary between real and synthetic media has become very thin. On the one hand, this opens the door to a series of exciting applications in different fields such as creative arts, advertising, film production, video games. On the other hand, it poses enormous security threats. Software packages freely available on the web allow any individual, without special skills, to create very realistic fake images and videos. So-called deepfakes can be used to manipulate public opinion during elections, commit fraud, discredit or blackmail people. Potential abuses are limited only by human imagination. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automated tools capable of detecting false multimedia content and avoiding the spread of dangerous false information. This review paper aims to present an analysis of the methods for visual media integrity verification, that is, the detection of manipulated images and videos. Special emphasis will be placed on the emerging phenomenon of deepfakes and, from the point of view of the forensic analyst, on modern data-driven forensic methods. The analysis will help to highlight the limits of current forensic tools, the most relevant issues, the upcoming challenges, and suggest future directions for research.

Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview

As realistic facial manipulation technologies have achieved remarkable progress, social concerns about potential malicious abuse of these technologies bring out an emerging research topic of face forgery detection. However, it is extremely challenging since recent advances are able to forge faces beyond the perception ability of human eyes, especially in compressed images and videos. We find that mining forgery patterns with the awareness of frequency could be a cure, as frequency provides a complementary viewpoint where either subtle forgery artifacts or compression errors could be well described. To introduce frequency into the face forgery detection, we propose a novel Frequency in Face Forgery Network (F3-Net), taking advantages of two different but complementary frequency-aware clues, 1) frequency-aware decomposed image components, and 2) local frequency statistics, to deeply mine the forgery patterns via our two-stream collaborative learning framework. We apply DCT as the applied frequency-domain transformation. Through comprehensive studies, we show that the proposed F3-Net significantly outperforms competing state-of-the-art methods on all compression qualities in the challenging FaceForensics++ dataset, especially wins a big lead upon low-quality media.

Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues

All the modern steganographic algorithms for digital images are content adaptive in the sense that they restrict the embedding modifications to complex regions of the cover, which are difficult to model for the steganalyst. The probabilities with which the individual cover elements are modified (the selection channel) are jointly determined by the size of the embedded payload and the content complexity. The most accurate detection of content-adaptive steganography is currently achieved with the detectors built as classifiers trained on cover and stego features that incorporate the knowledge of the selection channel. While the selection-channel-aware features have been proposed for detection of spatial domain steganography, an equivalent for the JPEG domain does not exist. Since modern steganographic algorithms for JPEG images are currently best detected with the features formed by the histograms of the noise residuals split by their JPEG phase, we use such feature sets as a starting point in this paper and extend their design to incorporate the knowledge of the selection channel. This is achieved by accumulating in the histograms a quantity that bounds the expected absolute distortion of the residual. The proposed features can be efficiently computed and provide a substantial detection gain across all the tested algorithms especially for small payloads.

Steganalysis Features for Content-Adaptive JPEG Steganography

Detection of modern JPEG steganographic algorithms has traditionally relied on features aware of the JPEG phase. In this paper, we port JPEG-phase awareness into the architecture of a convolutional neural network to boost the detection accuracy of such detectors. Another innovative concept introduced into the detector is the "catalyst kernel" that, together with traditional high-pass filters used to pre-process images allows the network to learn kernels more relevant for detection of stego signal introduced by JPEG steganography. Experiments with J-UNIWARD and UED-JC embedding algorithms are used to demonstrate the merit of the proposed design.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3082031.3083248

JPEG-Phase-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for Steganalysis of JPEG Images

Deep Learning for Detecting Processing History of Images.

Currently, the most popular detectors of content-adaptive image steganography are built using machine learning with images represented with rich features. Such high-dimensional descriptors, however, prevent utilization of more complex and potentially more accurate machine learning paradigms, such as kernelized support vector machines, due to infeasibly expensive training. In this paper, we demonstrate that explicit non-linear feature maps coupled with simple classifiers improve the accuracy of current steganalysis detectors built as binary classifiers as well as quantitative detectors in the form of payload regressors. The non-linear map is obtained by approximating a symmetric positive semi-definite kernel on selected pairs of cover features. Exponential forms of kernels derived from symmetrized Ali-Silvey distances improve the detection accuracy of binary detectors and lower the error of quantitative detectors across all tested steganographic schemes on grayscale and color images. The learned non-linear map only weakly depends on the cover source and its learning has a low computational complexity. The technique can also be used for unsupervised feature dimensionality reduction. For payload regressors, the dimensionality can be significantly reduced while simultaneously decreasing the estimation error.

Mehdi Boroumand

Papers

Deep Residual Network for Steganalysis of Digital Images

Steganalysis Features for Content-Adaptive JPEG Steganography

JPEG-Phase-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for Steganalysis of JPEG Images

Deep Learning for Detecting Processing History of Images.

Applications of Explicit Non-Linear Feature Maps in Steganalysis