Lightweight and Effective Deep Image Steganalysis Network

In this letter, a lightweight and effective deep steganalysis network (DSN) with less than 400,000 parameters, called LWENet, is proposed, which focuses on increasing the performance as well as significantly reducing the number of parameters (NP) from three perspectives. Firstly, in the preprocessing part, several lightweight bottleneck residual blocks are combined into the spatial rich model filters to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of stego signals while slightly increasing NP, thereby improving the subsequent performance. Secondly, a depthwise separable convolution layer is exploited at the end of the feature extraction part to largely reduce NP and increase the performance by capturing salient correlations while ignoring trivial ones among feature maps. Finally, to keep LWENet lightweight, we have to select only one fully connected (FC) layer. Simultaneously, multi-view global pooling is employed prior to the FC layer to yield multi-view features and further improve the detection performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves better performance than several state-of-the-art DSNs.