High invisibility image steganography with wavelet transform and generative adversarial network

Abstract

Recently, extensive research is showing that deep learning has enormous potential in image steganography. However, most steganography methods based on deep learning are not sufficiently invisible. In this paper, a novel end-to-end deep neural network for image steganography based on generative adversarial network (GAN) and discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) is proposed, which can greatly improve the invisibility of the method. Firstly, the cover image is transformed from the RGB domain to the DWT domain to embed information in frequency. Furthermore, a multi-scale attention convolution to fuse different scales of feature information is proposed, which can help the model to find a better location to embed the information. Finally, the fusion module is used to embed the information into the cover image at different modification intensities. In addition, a new Discriminator that compares cover images and stego images in a patch-to-patch way to improve the ability of the Discriminator. We analyze our algorithm from multiple aspects (e.g., security and invisibility) to verify the superior performance of the proposed method. To demonstrate generalization ability, experiments are conducted on three widely used datasets and show the superior performance of our method compared to other steganography methods based on deep learning.