Multifractal analysis of steganographic modified files in picture media

Steganography techniques hide information into different media in a way that is imperceptible to the human eye. Because of that there are opposite techniques, which try to uncover information that might be inside a file. The purpose of this paper is to analyze if a picture file that contains hidden data present changes in its multifractal characteristics. To test our claims we have applied image multifractal analysis to a set of pictures that contains different types of hidden data. We have discovered that a picture media manipulated by steganography techniques present changes in their original multifractal patterns, i.e. multifractal spectra and values of the generalized fractal dimension Dq. The analysis of these changes could possibly aid in the identification of a suspicious file.