LSB steganographic payload location for JPEG-decompressed images

Steganalysis always concentrates on the detection of the existence of the hidden information embedded into some digital multimedia by steganography. This paper presents a novel steganographic payload location method for spatial least significant bit (LSB) steganography with the JPEG-decompressed images used as the cover images. Firstly, we discuss the possibility of recovering the original cover image and compute the probability of successfully recovering. Then, we compute the distributions of the difference values between the estimated cover pixels and stego pixels in the payload-carrying and no-payload-carrying positions. Finally, combining with the theory of hypothesis test, we present a method to locate the payload-carrying pixels of JPEG-decompressed images, which is suitable for both LSB replacement and LSB matching. The experimental results show that: 1) the number of stego images needed to accurately locate all the payload-carrying pixels in the proposed method approaches the lower bound; 2) given the number of stego images, in the proposed method, the number of the payload-carrying pixels precisely located approaches the upper bound; 3) the proposed method performs better than some current state-of-the-art steganographic payload location methods for JPEG-decompressed images.