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Steganalysis in real-world application often exhibit skewed sample distribution which poses a massive challenge for steganography detection. Conventional steganalysis algorithms are not effective when the training data distribution is imbalanced, and may fail in the scenario of imbalanced data distribution. To address imbalanced data distribution issue in steganalysis, a novel framework termed adaptive cost-sensitive feature learning via F-measure maximization is proposed, which is inspired by the fact that F-measure is a more suitable performance metric compared to accuracy for imbalanced data. We investigate the adaptive cost-sensitive strategy by generating and assigning different weight to each instance with misclassification occurrence. This scheme adaptively determines the weights according to the intra-class and inter-class costs from the imbalanced distribution. Features corresponding to the largest F-measure can be obtained by solving a series of adaptive cost-sensitive feature learning problems with optimization theory. In this way, the learned features are the most representative features between the cover and stego images so that imbalanced steganalysis can significantly alleviate. Extensive experiments on various imbalanced steganalysis tasks show the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods, and it can recognize more minority samples and has excellent classification performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Found and molded the relationship between the high-frequency signal of image carrier and steganalysis accuracy. • Posterior accuracy is proposed to evaluate the real accuracy of steganalysis and it can be used to improve steganalysis performance in the actual environment, because we can find a subset with a high accuracy(such as 100%) from the prediction images which have a relatively low accuracy (such as 80%). • Actually, the relationship between image carrier and steganalysis accuracy can even be used to improve steganography performance significantly. Abstract Steganalysis research is committed to distinguishing the steganography media from the normal one correctly. However, individual differences of carriers disturb the detection inevitably and greatly. Existing methods treat all detection results with the same confidence level, or prior accuracy, which may make the prior accuracy overestimate or underestimate the real result. This paper presents a novel performance evaluation method of steganalysis based on posterior accuracy. Adaptive Convolution Feature (ACF) is calculated by the adaptive convolution, then a quantitative value S based on the ACF is modeled to posterior testify and estimate the detection confidence of the image under test. By clustering of carrier noise, we classify the images which we believe they have a similar confidence of the same cluster. The distribution of ACF from each cluster indicates that the S value works well for confidence evaluation. The experimental results show that the S value can distinguish and identify high-confidence samples from the low-confidence, which will greatly improve the real performance of steganalysis. Besides, it improves the steganalysis accuracy of the whole image set by matching S values between training and prediction samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]