An Enhanced Steganography Network for Concealing and Protecting Secret Image Data

Abstract

The development of Internet technology has provided great convenience for data transmission and sharing, but it also brings serious security problems that are related to data protection. As is detailed in this paper, an enhanced steganography network was designed to protect secret image data that contains private or confidential information; this network consists of a concealing network and a revealing network in order to achieve image embedding and recovery separately. To reduce the system’s computation complexity, we constructed the network’s framework using a down–up structure in order to compress the intermediate feature maps. In order to mitigate the input’s information loss caused by a sequence of convolution blocks, the long skip concatenation method was designed to pass the raw information to the top layer, thus synthesizing high-quality hidden images with fine texture details. In addition, we propose a novel strategy called non-activated feature fusion (NAFF), which is designed to provide stronger supervision for synthetizing higher-quality hidden images and recovered images. In order to further boost the hidden image’s visual quality and enhance its imperceptibility, an attention mechanism-based enhanced module was designed to reconstruct and enhance the salient target, thus covering up and obscuring the embedded secret content. Furthermore, a hybrid loss function that is composed of pixel domain loss and structure domain loss was designed to boost the hidden image’s structural quality and visual security. Our experimental results demonstrate that, due to the elaborate design of the network structure and loss function, our proposed method achieves high levels of imperceptibility and security.

Content Protection Method for Remote Sensing Images Based on Deep Information Hiding

“…However, due to the absence of a discriminator within the framework, the enhancement in performance was not markedly evident. Some researchers introduce the attention mechanism into the field of deep information hiding [10,[22][23][24], and promising results have been achieved. Tan et al [23].…”

“…In order to verify the necessity of this study, we do some comparative experiments to verify that the proposed algorithm is more suitable for our RSI security distribution task from different perspectives. Specifically, we selected six deep information hiding algorithms [8,11,12,20,24,35] that are close to the idea and method of the algorithm in this paper. They only completed the process of hiding pictures in pictures, without special design for RSI.…”

Lightweight Steganography Technique in The Internet of Things: A survey

“…However, their technique is restricted to image-based data transfer or storage, and it could not be relevant to other types of data. Furthermore, the authors did not investigate how various cover pictures or hidden images affected the functionality of their network [1].…”

“…The integration of intelligent technology with information technology is rapidly advancing, and remote monitoring and control through the internet is possible, but this convenience comes with potential security threats if proper measures are not taken [1] [2]. Smart devices like cameras must wirelessly transmit data to central servers due to limited energy and computing power [3].…”

“…Smart devices like cameras must wirelessly transmit data to central servers due to limited energy and computing power [3]. Encryption techniques provide security for the content of information, but they do not conceal the presence of secret information [1]. Steganography is employed to hide information and establish a covert communication channel for secret messages that only the intended recipient is aware of [4].…”