CIS-Net: A Novel CNN Model for Spatial Image Steganalysis via Cover Image Suppression

Image steganalysis is a special binary classification problem that aims to classify natural cover images and suspected stego images which are the results of embedding very weak secret message signals into covers. How to effectively suppress cover image content and thus make the classification of cover images and stego images easier is the key of this task. Recent researches show that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very effective to detect steganography by learning discriminative features between cover images and their stegos. Several deep CNN models have been proposed via incorporating domain knowledge of image steganography/steganalysis into the design of the network and achieve state of the art performance on standard database. Following such direction, we propose a novel model called Cover Image Suppression Network (CIS-Net), which improves the performance of spatial image steganalysis by suppressing cover image content as much as possible in model learning. Two novel layers, the Single-value Truncation Layer (STL) and Sub-linear Pooling Layer (SPL), are proposed in this work. Specifically, STL truncates input values into a same threshold when they are out of a predefined interval. Theoretically, we have proved that STL can reduce the variance of input feature map without deteriorating useful information. For SPL, it utilizes sub-linear power function to suppress large valued elements introduced by cover image contents and aggregates weak embedded signals via average pooling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed network equipped with STL and SPL achieves better performance than rich model classifiers and existing CNN models on challenging steganographic algorithms.