High-Capacity Image Steganography Based on Improved FC-DenseNet

Abstract

Aiming at the problem that the traditional steganography based on carrier modification has the low steganographic capacity, a steganographic scheme based on Fully Convolutional Dense Connection Network (FC-DenseNet) is proposed. Since FC-DenseNet can effectively overcome the problems of gradient dissipation and gradient explosion, and a large number of features are multiplexed, the cascaded secret image and carrier image can reconstruct good image quality after entering the network. Effectively improve steganographic capacity. First, we reset the number of input channels of the first convolution block of FC-DenseNet and the number of output channels of the last convolution block and deleted the LogSoftmax() function. On the sender side, after the concatenated secret image and carrier image pass through the hidden network FC-DenseNet, the secret image is embedded in the carrier image to obtain a stego-image. At the receiving side, the extraction network reconstructs the secret image from the stego-image. Experimental results show that our proposed steganography scheme not only has a high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR) and Structural Similarity(SSIM) but also can realize large-capacity image steganography, with an average image payload capacity of 23.96 bit per pixel.