Robust Invertible Image Steganography

Youmin Xu, Chong Mou, Yujie Hu, Jingfen Xie, Jian Zhang

Abstract: Image steganography aims to hide secret images into a container image, where the secret is hidden from human vision and can be restored when necessary. Previous image steganography methods are limited in hiding capacity and robustness, commonly vulnerable to distortion on container images such as Gaussian noise, Poisson noise, and lossy compression. This paper presents a novelflow-basedframe-work for robust invertible image steganography, dubbed as RIIS. A conditional normalizing flow is introduced to model the distribution of the redundant high-frequency component with the condition of the container image. Moreover, a well-designed container enhancement module (CEM) also contributes to the robust reconstruction. To regulate the net-work parameters for different distortion levels, a distortion-guided modulation (DGM) is implemented over flow-based blocks to make it a one-size-fits-all model. In terms of both clean and distorted image steganography, extensive experi-ments reveal that the proposed RIIS efficiently improves the robustness while maintaining imperceptibility and capacity. As far as we know, we are the first to propose a learning-based scheme to enhance the robustness of image steganog-raphy in the literature. The guarantee of steganography ro-bustness significantly broadens the application of steganog-raphy in real-world applications.