HEVC Video Steganalysis Based on Centralized Error and Attention Mechanism

With high embedding capacity and security, transform coefficient-based video steganography has become an important branch of video steganography. However, existing steganalysis methods against transform coefficient-based steganography provide insufficient consideration to the prediction process of HEVC compression, which results in steganalysis that is not straightforward and fail to effectively detect adaptive steganography methods in low embedding rate scenarios. In this paper, an HEVC video steganalysis method based on centralized error and attention mechanism against transform coefficient-based steganography is proposed. Firstly, the centralized error phenomenon brought by distortion compensation-based steganography is analyzed, and prediction error maps is constructed for steganalysis to achieve higher SNR(signal-to-noise ratio). Secondly, a video steganalysis network called CESNet (Centralized Error Steganalysis Network) is proposed. The network takes the prediction error maps as input and four types of convolutional modules are designed to adapt to different stages of feature extraction. To address the intra-frame sparsity of adaptive steganography, CEA (Centralized Error Attention) modules based on spatial and channel attention mechanisms are proposed to adaptively enhance the steganographic region. Finally, after extracting the feature vectors of each frame, the detection of steganographic video is completed using the self-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that compared with the existing transform coefficient-based video steganalysis methods, the proposed method can effectively detect multiple transform coefficient-based steganography algorithms and achieve higher detection performance in low payload scenarios.