However, many existing watermarking methods, particularly content-agnostic approaches that embed fixed patterns regardless of image content, are vulnerable to steganalysis attacks that can extract and remove the watermark with minimal perceptual distortion. In this work, we categorise watermarking algorithms into content-adaptive and content-agnostic ones, and demonstrate how averaging a collection of watermarked images could reveal the underlying watermark pattern. We then leverage this extracted pattern for effective watermark removal under both greybox and blackbox settings, even when the collection of images contains multiple watermark patterns. For some algorithms like Tree-Ring watermarks, the extracted pattern can also forge convincing watermarks on clean images. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations across twelve watermarking methods highlight the threat posed by steganalysis to content-agnostic watermarks and the importance of designing watermarking techniques resilient to such analytical attacks. We propose security guidelines calling for using content-adaptive watermarking strategies and performing security evaluation against steganalysis. We also suggest multi-key assignments as potential mitigations against steganalysis vulnerabilities.

In this study, we attempt to place a full size color image within another image of the same size.

Steganography and steganalysis are strongly related subjects of information security. Over the past decade, many powerful and efficient artificial intelligence (AI) - driven techniques have been designed and presented during research into steganography as well as steganalysis. This study presents a scientometric analysis of AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques using a thematic modelling approach. A total of 654 articles within the time span of 2017 to 2023 have been considered. Experimental evaluation of the study reveals that 69% of published articles are from Asian countries. The China is on top (TP:312), followed by India (TP-114). The study mainly identifies seven thematic clusters: steganographic image data hiding, deep image steganalysis, neural watermark robustness, linguistic steganography models, speech steganalysis algorithms, covert communication networks, and video steganography techniques. The proposed study also assesses the scope of AI-steganography under the purview of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to present the interdisciplinary reciprocity between them. It has been observed that only 18 of the 654 articles are aligned with one of the SDGs, which shows that limited studies conducted in alignment with SDG goals. SDG9 which is Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure is leading among 18 SDGs mapped articles. To the top of our insight, this study is the unique one to present a scientometric study on AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques. In the context of descriptive statistics, the study breaks down the underlying causes of observed trends, including the influence of DL developments, trends in East Asia and maturity of foundational methods. The work also stresses upon the critical gaps in societal alignment, particularly the SDGs, ultimately working on unveiling the field's global impact on AI security challenges.

Secure data hiding remains a fundamental challenge in digital communication, requiring a careful balance between computational efficiency and perceptual transparency. The balance between security and performance is increasingly fragile with the emergence of generative AI systems capable of autonomously generating and optimising sophisticated cryptanalysis and steganalysis algorithms, thereby accelerating the exposure of vulnerabilities in conventional data-hiding schemes. This work introduces SteganoSNN, a neuromorphic steganographic framework that exploits spiking neural networks (SNNs) to achieve secure, low-power, and high-capacity multimedia data hiding. Digitised audio samples are converted into spike trains using leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, encrypted via a modulo-based mapping scheme, and embedded into the least significant bits of RGBA image channels using a dithering mechanism to minimise perceptual distortion. Implemented in Python using NEST and realised on a PYNQ-Z2 FPGA, SteganoSNN attains real-time operation with an embedding capacity of 8 bits per pixel. Experimental evaluations on the DIV2K 2017 dataset demonstrate image fidelity between 40.4 dB and 41.35 dB in PSNR and SSIM values consistently above 0.97, surpassing SteganoGAN in computational efficiency and robustness. SteganoSNN establishes a foundation for neuromorphic steganography, enabling secure, energy-efficient communication for Edge-AI, IoT, and biomedical applications.

For some algorithms like Tree-Ring watermarks, the extracted pattern can also forge convincing watermarks on clean images. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations across twelve watermarking methods highlight the threat posed by steganalysis to content-agnostic watermarks and the importance of designing watermarking techniques resilient to such analytical attacks.

Steganalysis methods based on deep learning (DL) often struggle with computational complexity and challenges in generalizing across different datasets. Incorporating a graph neural network (GNN) into steganalysis schemes enables the leveraging of relational data for improved detection accuracy and adaptability. This paper presents the first application of a Graph Neural Network (GNN), specifically the GraphSAGE architecture, for steganalysis of compressed voice over IP (VoIP) speech streams. The method involves straightforward graph construction from VoIP streams and employs GraphSAGE to capture hierarchical steganalysis information, including both fine grained details and high level patterns, thereby achieving high detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed approach performs well in uncovering quantization index modulation (QIM)-based steganographic patterns in VoIP signals. It achieves detection accuracy exceeding 98 percent even for short 0.5 second samples, and 95.17 percent accuracy under challenging conditions with low embedding rates, representing an improvement of 2.8 percent over the best performing state of the art methods. Furthermore, the model exhibits superior efficiency, with an average detection time as low as 0.016 seconds for 0.5-second samples an improvement of 0.003 seconds. This makes it efficient for online steganalysis tasks, providing a superior balance between detection accuracy and efficiency under the constraint of short samples with low embedding rates.

However, many existing watermarking methods, particularly content-agnostic approaches that embed fixed patterns regardless of image content, are vulnerable to steganalysis attacks that can extract and remove the watermark with minimal perceptual distortion. In this work, we categorise watermarking algorithms into content-adaptive and content-agnostic ones, and demonstrate how averaging a collection of watermarked images could reveal the underlying watermark pattern. We then leverage this extracted pattern for effective watermark removal under both greybox and blackbox settings, even when the collection of images contains multiple watermark patterns. For some algorithms like Tree-Ring watermarks, the extracted pattern can also forge convincing watermarks on clean images. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations across twelve watermarking methods highlight the threat posed by steganalysis to content-agnostic watermarks and the importance of designing watermarking techniques resilient to such analytical attacks.

The ubiquity of social media platforms facilitates malicious linguistic steganography, posing significant security risks. Steganalysis is profoundly hindered by the challenge of identifying subtle cognitive inconsistencies arising from textual fragmentation and complex dialogue structures, and the difficulty in achieving robust aggregation of multi-dimensional weak signals, especially given extreme steganographic sparsity and sophisticated steganography. These core detection difficulties are compounded by significant data imbalance. This paper introduces GSDFuse, a novel method designed to systematically overcome these obstacles. GSDFuse employs a holistic approach, synergistically integrating hierarchical multi-modal feature engineering to capture diverse signals, strategic data augmentation to address sparsity, adaptive evidence fusion to intelligently aggregate weak signals, and discriminative embedding learning to enhance sensitivity to subtle inconsistencies. Experiments on social media datasets demonstrate GSDFuse's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in identifying sophisticated steganography within complex dialogue environments. The source code for GSDFuse is available at https://github.com/NebulaEmmaZh/GSDFuse.

For deep learning-based image steganography frameworks, in order to ensure the invisibility and recoverability of the information embedding, the loss function usually contains several losses such as embedding loss, recovery loss and steganalysis loss. In previous research works, fixed loss weights are usually chosen for training optimization, and this setting is not linked to the importance of the steganography task itself and the training process. In this paper, we propose a Two-stage Curriculum Learning loss scheduler (TSCL) for balancing multinomial losses in deep learning image steganography algorithms. TSCL consists of two phases: a priori curriculum control and loss dynamics control. The first phase firstly focuses the model on learning the information embedding of the original image by controlling the loss weights in the multi-party adversarial training; secondly, it makes the model shift its learning focus to improving the decoding accuracy; and finally, it makes the model learn to generate a steganographic image that is resistant to steganalysis. In the second stage, the learning speed of each training task is evaluated by calculating the loss drop of the before and after iteration rounds to balance the learning of each task. Experimental results on three large public datasets, ALASKA2, VOC2012 and ImageNet, show that the proposed TSCL strategy improves the quality of steganography, decoding accuracy and security.