Generative adversarial networks-based image steganography with multiscale features integration

Abstract

As an effective method of information hiding, steganography embeds secret information into images in a way that is not perceived by humans. Recent interest in the combination of image steganography and generative adversarial networks (GANs) has yielded rapid progress. However, existing steganography frameworks still suffer from the low quality of the steganographic images and weak resistance to detection by steganalysis algorithms. To overcome these limitations, we propose an effective GAN-based image steganography framework with multiscale features integration. Specifically, we construct the secret image feature extraction network (SfeNet), which is driven by the spatial attention mechanism to extract multiscale features of secret images. And the encoder combined with the efficient channel attention mechanism is presented to embed multiscale features of secret images into the cover image. Subsequently, a steganalyzer is incorporated as the discriminator with the encoder in GAN to strengthen the ability of the model to resist steganalysis. Besides, a mixed loss function is proposed by combining perceptual loss, MS-SSIM, and L1 loss to preserve the structural similarity of images. Experimental results on ImageNet, Pascal VOC2012, and LFW show that the proposed method achieves better quality steganographic images and better resistance to steganalysis compared to some of the state-of-the-art steganography algorithms.