In this paper, we investigate the effect of pretraining CNNs on Ima-geNet on their performance when refined for steganalysis of digital images. In many cases, it seems that just 'seeing' a large number of images helps with the convergence of the network during the refinement no matter what the pretraining task is. To achieve the best performance, the pretraining task should be related to steganalysis, even if it is done on a completely mismatched cover and stego datasets. Furthermore, the pretraining does not need to be carried out for very long and can be done with limited computational resources. An additional advantage of the pretraining is that it is done on color images and can later be applied for steganalysis of color and grayscale images while still having on-par or better performance than detectors trained specifically for a given source. The refining process is also much faster than training the network from scratch. The most surprising part of the paper is that networks pretrained on JPEG images are a good starting point for spatial domain steganalysis as well.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.