Coverless Image Steganography Based on Multi-Object Recognition

Abstract

Most of the existing coverless steganography approaches have poor robustness to geometric attacks, because these approaches use features of the entire image to map information, and these features are easy to be lost when being attacked. In order to improve the robustness against geometric attacks, we propose a coverless image steganography method based on multi-object recognition. In this scheme, we firstly use Faster RCNN to detect objects in the image data set, establish a mapping dictionary between object labels and binary sequence. Then we propose a novel mapping rule based on the filtered robust object labels for sequence generation. Therefore, an image can generate robust binary sequence through multi-objects recognition. In the transmission process, the transmitted image has not been modified, so our method can fundamentally resist steganalysis tools and avoid the attacker’s suspicions. In addition, the capacity and hiding rate of the proposed method are both considerable. Evaluations with under geometric attacks shows, on average, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.1\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> robustness increase over other five coverless steganography methods. Moreover, evaluations under ten noise attacks shows, on average, the robustness of our method is also excellent, which reaches 83%.