Audio steganalysis based on reversed psychoacoustic model of human hearing

• Based on a model with maximum deviation from human auditory system, a new steganalysis method is proposed.
• The method is tested on wide range of data hiding algorithms and in both targeted and universal scenarios.
• The proposed method improves detection rate of targeted and universal scenarios by 17.3% and 20.8%.

During the last decade, audio information hiding has attracted lots of attention due to its ability to provide a covert communication channel. On the other hand, various audio steganalysis schemes have been developed to detect the presence of any secret messages. Basically, audio steganography methods attempt to hide their messages in areas of time or frequency domains where human auditory system (HAS) does not perceive. Considering this fact, we propose a reliable audio steganalysis system based on the reversed Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (R-MFCC) which aims to provide a model with maximum deviation from HAS model. Genetic algorithm is deployed to optimize dimension of the R-MFCC-based features. This will both speed up feature extraction and reduce the complexity of classification. The final decision is made by a trained support vector machine (SVM) to detect suspicious audio files. The proposed method achieves detection rates of 97.8% and 94.4% in the targeted (Steghide@1.563%) and universal scenarios. These results are respectively 17.3% and 20.8% higher than previous D2-MFCC based method.

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