Skip to content

Hunting wild stego images, a domain adaptation problem in digital image forensics

Published: 2020
Primary Author: Li Lin
Research Area: Digital

Digital image forensics is a field encompassing camera identication, forgery detection and steganalysis. Statistical modeling and machine learning have been successfully applied in the academic community of this maturing field. Still, large gaps exist between academic results and applications used by practicing forensic analysts, especially when the target samples are drawn from a different population than the data in a reference database.

This thesis contains four published papers aiming at narrowing this gap in three different fields: mobile stego app detection, digital image steganalysis and camera identification. It is the first work to explore a way of extending the academic methods to real world images created by apps. New ideas and methods are developed for target images with very rich flexibility in the embedding rates, embedding algorithms, exposure settings and camera sources. The experimental results proved that the proposed methods work very well, even for the devices which are not included in the reference database.

Related Resources

LibDroid: Summarizing information flow of Android Native Libraries via Static Analysis

LibDroid: Summarizing information flow of Android Native Libraries via Static Analysis

With advancements in technology, people are taking advantage of mobile devices to access e-mails, search the web, and video chat. Therefore, extracting evidence from mobile phones is an important component…
Evaluating Reference Sets for Score-Based Likelihood Ratios for Camera Device Identification

Evaluating Reference Sets for Score-Based Likelihood Ratios for Camera Device Identification

An investigator wants to know if an illicit image captured by an unknown camera was taken by a person of interest’s (POI’s) phone. Score-based likelihood ratios (SLRs) have been used…
Likelihood Ratios for Categorical Evidence with Applications to Digital Forensics

Likelihood Ratios for Categorical Evidence with Applications to Digital Forensics

In forensic investigations, the goal of evidence evaluation is often to address source-/identity-based questions in which the evidence consists of two sets of observations: one from an unknown source tied…
Automatic Detection of Android Steganography Apps via Symbolic Execution and Tree Matching

Automatic Detection of Android Steganography Apps via Symbolic Execution and Tree Matching

The recent focus of cyber security on automated detection of malware for Android apps has omitted the study of some apps used for “legitimate” purposes, such as steganography apps. Mobile…