Anti-forensic Approach to Remove StegoContent from Images and Videos

摘要

Covert transmission of information hidden in different media to eithera general or targeted audience constitutes steganography. However, thistechnique can be misused to transmit undesirable information. Traditionallythe removal of such content necessitated the knowledge of the steganographicalgorithm used.However,we address the scenariowhere such stego isremovedusing generic image processing operations along with an anti forensic methodwithout assuming any knowledge of the steganographic algorithm used. Theapplication of generic image processing operations also causes degradationof cover image, which can also be restored using this anti forensic method.Our procedure has been tested on a variety of steganographic algorithmsincluding HUGO-BD,WOW, Synch and J-UNIWARD. By applying universalsteganalysis we found that all images which have been subjected to ourprocedure have become stego free. However, a direct evaluation of the stegocontent assuming knowledge of the stego content and its location showedthat 80 percentage of the stego is removed without significantly impactingthe visual image quality. Video stream containing isolated static images havebeen addressed in this paper.