Open Access

ARTICLE

Image Steganalysis Based on an Adaptive Attention Mechanism and Lightweight DenseNet

Zhenxiang He^*, Rulin Wu, Xinyuan Wang

School of Cyberspace Security, Gansu University of Political Science and Law, Lanzhou, 730070, China

* Corresponding Author: Zhenxiang He. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2025, 85(1), 1631-1651. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.067252

Received 28 April 2025; Accepted 12 June 2025; Issue published 29 August 2025

Abstract

With the continuous advancement of steganographic techniques, the task of image steganalysis has become increasingly challenging, posing significant obstacles to the fields of information security and digital forensics. Although existing deep learning methods have achieved certain progress in steganography detection, they still encounter several difficulties in real-world applications. Specifically, current methods often struggle to accurately focus on steganography sensitive regions, leading to limited detection accuracy. Moreover, feature information is frequently lost during transmission, which further reduces the model’s generalization ability. These issues not only compromise the reliability of steganography detection but also hinder its applicability in complex scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel deep image steganalysis network designed to enhance detection accuracy and improve the retention of steganographic information through multilevel feature optimization and global perceptual modeling. The network consists of three core modules: the preprocessing module, the feature extraction module, and the classification module. In the preprocessing stage, a Spatial Rich Model (SRM) filter is introduced to extract the high-frequency residual information of the image to initially enhance the steganographic features; at the same time, a lightweight Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet) structure is proposed to enhance the effective transmission and retention of the features and alleviate the information loss problem in the deep network. In the feature extraction stage, a hybrid modeling structure combining depth-separated convolution and ordinary convolution is constructed to improve the feature extraction efficiency and feature description capability; in addition, a dual-domain adaptive attention mechanism integrating channel and spatial dimensions is designed to dynamically allocate feature weights to achieve precise focusing on the steganography-sensitive region. Finally, the classification module adopts dual fully connected layers to realize the effective differentiation between coverage and steganography maps. These innovative designs not only effectively improve the accuracy and generalization ability of steganography detection, but also provide a new efficient network structure for the field of steganalysis. Numerous experimental results show that the detection performance of the proposed method outperforms the existing mainstream methods, such as SR-Net, TSNet, and CVTStego-Net, on the publicly available dataset BOSSbase and BOSW2. Meanwhile, multiple ablation experiments further validate the validity and reasonableness of the proposed network structure. These results not only promote the development of steganalysis technology but also provide more reliable detection tools for the fields of information security and digital forensics.

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Keywords

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