Benchmarking Steganalysis

This chapter discusses how to evaluate the effectiveness of steganalysis techniques. In the steganalysis literature, numerous different methods are used to measure detection accuracy, with different authors using incompatible benchmarks. Thus it is difficult to make a fair comparison of competing steganalysis methods. This chapter argues that some of the choices for steganalysis benchmarks are demonstrably poor, either in statistical foundation or by over-valuing irrelevant areas of the performance envelope. Good choices of benchmark are highlighted, and simple statistical techniques demonstrated for evaluating the significance of observed performance differences. It is hoped that this chapter will make practitioners and steganalysis researchers better able to evaluate the quality of steganography detection methods.