A Simple Technique for Estimating Message Lengths for Additive Noise Steganography

We propose a practical steganalysis method to detect hidden information and estimate embedding rate. By modelling steganographic embedding as an additive noise process, we exploit the fact that the mean and variance of stegosignal is a function of embedding rate. This can be used to estimate the embedding rate without knowledge of the original cover object. We present simulation results to demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate embedding rate with reasonable accuracy. The technique we propose is general and can be used for steganalysis of images, video, and audio etc.