Leveraging coverless image steganography to hide secret information by generating anime characters using GAN

Abstract

There has been a growing need for secure communication in recent years, particularly in the digital realm. Researchers have developed various text-hiding methods to address this need, but these methods often suffer from limitations such as low embedding capacity or high embedding distortion. However, current methods for information hiding require a large image database or have a low capacity for hiding information, which makes them impractical. To address these issues, we propose a coverless information-hiding method that generates anime characters through generative adversarial networks (GANs). This method converts secret information into an attribute label set for anime characters and uses the label set to generate anime characters directly. The quality of the generated anime characters was improved by the super-resolution GAN (SRGAN) model. The resulting images were used to communicate secret information on the digital channel. Numerous experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, including hiding capacity, image clarity, robustness and security. Results showed that the proposed framework outperforms existing text-hiding methods in terms of hiding capacity and robustness while maintaining image clarity and computation time. In conclusion, our proposed framework provides a secure and efficient solution for text encryption and decryption in feasible computation time using anime characters generated by a GAN. The framework has a high embedding capacity and low embedding distortion, making it a promising solution for secure communication in the digital world.