Feature Engineering Techniques for Stegware Analysis: An Extensive Survey

The art of hiding secret text within an innocuous cover medium is steganography. Steganalysis is the counterpart of steganography which focuses on the detection and extraction of the secret text from the medium. Feature engineering is the crucial field in Stegware Analysis which intends to identify more specific features, focusing on the accuracy and efficiency. Feature Engineering is a process in Machine learning where the features of any dataset are selected and extracted for further use. Feature engineering is the process of extracting, transforming and selecting the most relevant features form the data that aids in discriminating between the stego and cover image. This is because, most of the time, the data will be in a raw format. Any ML model needs the data to be pre-processed and kept ready to train the model. Thus, from the pool of raw data, the required data needs to be selected and can be used in training the model. Further, the data at point needs to be extracted to get the precise data. The scope of the work is to identify the various feature engineering techniques available in practice and efficiently use them to achieve high accuracy and precision in the system. The survey focuses on the several feature selection and extraction techniques like filter method, wrapper method and embedded methods. Correlation being one of the feature selection methods is focused; while statistical moments computes the mean, variance and skewness of the feature. The extraction method holds the Computation of Invariants and other such. Comparative study is made on both the methods to understand the concepts with ease. The work starts by taking a sample from the dataset and few feature extraction techniques are applied on the same. Then the original image is compared with the extracted images with the view of histogram. The paper gives valuable insights into the effectiveness of different feature engineering techniques using the dataset and underscores the importance of feature engineering in enhancing machine learning model performance. The selection and combination of these features can remarkable impact the effectiveness of the data, improving the accuracy of the systems.