Shikha Badhani

Work place: Department of Computer Science, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi, India

E-mail: sbadhani@maitreyi.du.ac.in

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Research Interests:

Biography

Shikha Badhani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Maitreyi College, University of Delhi, with over 16 years of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership. A University Gold Medalist at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels from the University of Delhi, she specializes in Information Security, Android Malware Detection, Machine Learning, Explainable AI, and Generative AI. Her Ph.D. from the University of Delhi focused on developing novel techniques for Android malware detection, leading to publications in reputed international journals, including Computers & Security, and prominent international conferences. She is currently exploring the area of LLMs to further her research.

Author Articles
From Pixels to Processes: A Process Mining- Inspired Approach to Image Steganalysis

By Shikha Badhani Vinita Verma Manju Bhardwaj Sakeena Shahid Geetan Manchanda

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmsc.2026.03.04, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2026

Steganography attempts to conceal messages in plain sight while steganalysis seeks to identify them or, more importantly, to extract the embedded data. Low-payload and spatially localized steganographic embedding is increasingly used to evade detection by classical steganalysis methods. While such strategies preserve global image statistics and remain visually imperceptible, they can disrupt natural pixel-level behavior. This work proposes a behavioral steganalysis framework inspired by process mining that detects image steganography by analyzing localized behavioral deviation using regional behavioral contrast and behavioral amplification. Experiments on lossless grayscale PNG images from the USC SIPI database and 10,000 images from the BOWS2 dataset using 1-bit LSB embedding show that the proposed framework reliably identifies steganographic embedding. On the USC SIPI dataset, conventional statistical detectors, including chi-square analysis and the StegExpose tool, showed limited detection capability under the evaluated localized embedding settings. Despite high perceptual quality of stego images (PSNR > 55 dB), significant behavioral deviation is consistently observed within embedded regions. These results demonstrate that the proposed process mining-inspired framework provides an interpretable and complementary direction for image steganalysis, particularly under low-payload and localized embedding scenarios.

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