A High-Capacity and High-Security Image Steganography Network Based on Chaotic Mapping and Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract

With the enhancement of information volume, people are not satisfied with transmitting only a single secret image at a time but chase to hide multiple secret images in a single picture; however, the large-capacity steganographic scale can easily lead to the degradation of the quality of the image, which attracts the attention of eavesdroppers. In this paper, we propose a Chaotic mapping-enHanced imAge Steganography nEtwork (CHASE), which pioneers to hide colour images in grey images and reduces the difference between the container image and the cover image through the image permutation method, so as to enhance the security of the steganography. The method demonstrates excellent steganalysis resistance in experiments and introduces Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to improve the image fidelity in large-capacity steganographic scales. The fusion of chaotic mapping and GAN optimisation enables the steganographic network to simultaneously balance security and image quality. The experimental results show that CHASE can keep the secret image with good invisibility under large-capacity steganographic scales, and at the same time, it can reveal the secret image with high fidelity, and its steganalysis-resistant capability is much better than other state-of-the-art methods.