# DeepCapture: Image Spam Detection Using Deep Learning and Data Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08885 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08885/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RAIDER: Reinforcement-aided Spear Phishing Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07582/) (2021)
- [PhishClone: Measuring the Efficacy of Cloning Evasion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01582/) (2022)
- [A Late Multi-Modal Fusion Model for Detecting Hybrid Spam E-mail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14616/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image spam emails are often used to evade text-based spam filters that detect spam emails with their frequently used keywords. In this paper, we propose a new image spam email detection tool called DeepCapture using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. There have been many efforts to detect image spam emails, but there is a significant performance degrade against entirely new and unseen image spam emails due to overfitting during the training phase. To address this challenging issue, we mainly focus on developing a more robust model to address the overfitting problem. Our key idea is to build a CNN-XGBoost framework consisting of eight layers only with a large number of training samples using data augmentation techniques tailored towards the image spam detection task. To show the feasibility of DeepCapture, we evaluate its performance with publicly available datasets consisting of 6,000 spam and 2,313 non-spam image samples. The experimental results show that DeepCapture is capable of achieving an F1-score of 88%, which has a 6% improvement over the best existing spam detection model CNN-SVM with an F1-score of 82%. Moreover, DeepCapture outperformed existing image spam detection solutions against new and unseen image datasets.