Lossless Image Steganography Based on Invertible Neural Networks

Image steganography is a scheme that hides secret information in a cover image without being perceived. Most of the existing steganography methods are more concerned about the visual similarity between the stego image and the cover image, and they ignore the recovery accuracy of secret information. In this paper, the steganography method based on invertible neural networks is proposed, which can generate stego images with high invisibility and security and can achieve lossless recovery for secret information. In addition, this paper introduces a mapping module that can compress information actually embedded to improve the quality of the stego image and its antidetection ability. In order to restore message and prevent loss, the secret information is converted into a binary sequence and then embedded in the cover image through the forward operation of the invertible neural networks. This information will then be recovered from the stego image through the inverse operation of the invertible neural networks. Experimental results show that the proposed method in this paper has achieved competitive results in the visual quality and safety of stego images and achieved 100% accuracy in information extraction.