The secure steganography for hiding images via GAN

Abstract

Steganography is one of the important methods in the field of information hiding, which is the technique of hiding secret data within an ordinary file or message in order to avoid the detection of steganalysis models and human eyes. In recent years, many scholars have applied various deep learning networks to the field of steganalysis to improve the accuracy of detection. The rapid improvement of the accuracy of steganalysis models has caused a huge threat to the security of steganography. In addition, another important factor that limits the security of steganography is capacity. The larger the capacity, the worse and more unnatural the visual quality of carrier images after embedded. Therefore, this paper proposes a steganography model—HIGAN, which constructs the encoding network composed of residual blocks to hide the color secret image into another color image of the same size to output a lower distortion and higher visual quality steganographic image. Moreover, it utilizes the adversarial training between the encoder-decoder network and the steganalysis model to improve the ability to resist the detection of steganalysis models based on deep learning. The experimental results show that our proposed model is achievable and effective. Compared with the previous steganography model for hiding color images based on deep learning, the steganography model in this article could achieve steganographic images with higher visual quality and stronger security.