Locating steganographic payload for LSB matching embedding

Many highly sensitive detectors for least significant bit (LSB) matching steganography have been proposed so far, but few of them can locate the embedding payload. Assuming a number of stego images with payload placed in the same locations are provided, Ker presented a residual-based method to identify the payload-carrying locations for LSB matching. In this paper, we put forward two novel residuals and theoretically prove their reliability for LSB matching detection. Experimental results show that the proposed weighted l¹ and l² residuals significantly outperform the previous work in terms of both detection performance and computational complexity. Even very small payload can be perfectly detected and precisely located as long as adequate stego images are available.