Traditional image steganography often leans interests towards safely embedding hidden information into cover images with payload capacity almost neglected. This paper combines recent deep convolutional neural network methods with image-into-image steganography. It successfully hides the same size images with a decoding rate of 98.2 or bpp (bits per pixel) of 23.57 by changing only 0.76 of the cover image on average. Our method directly learns end-to-end mappings between the cover image and the embedded image and between the hidden image and the decoded image. We further show that our embedded image, while with mega payload capacity, is still robust to statistical analysis.
LSB (Least Significant Bit)-based methods @cite_19 are the most commonly used image domain steganography methods which hide information at the pixel level. Most LSB methods aim at altering parts of the cover image to such an extent that human visual system can barely notice. These methods are motivated by the fact that the visual part of most figures is dominated by the highest bits of each pixel, and the LSB bits (the underlined part of one pixel as shown in Figure ) are statistically similar to randomly generated data, and therefore, hiding information via altering LSB cannot change the visual result apparently.
@cite_19
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This letter proposes a modification to the least-significant-bit (LSB) matching, a steganographic method for embedding message bits into a still image. In the LSB matching, the choice of whether to add or subtract one from the cover image pixel is random. The new method uses the choice to set a binary function of two cover pixels to the desired value. The embedding is performed using a pair of pixels as a unit, where the LSB of the first pixel carries one bit of information, and a function of the two pixel values carries another bit of information. Therefore, the modified method allows embedding the same payload as LSB matching but with fewer changes to the cover image. The experimental results of the proposed method show better performance than traditional LSB matching in terms of distortion and resistance against existing steganalysis.