Robust Image Steganography: Hiding Messages in Frequency Coefficients

Abstract

Steganography is a technique that hides secret messages into a public multimedia object without raising suspicion from third parties. However, most existing works cannot provide good robustness against lossy JPEG compression while maintaining a relatively large embedding capacity. This paper presents an end-to-end robust steganography system based on the invertible neural network (INN). Instead of hiding in the spatial domain, our method directly hides secret messages into the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the cover image, which significantly improves the robustness and anti-steganalysis security. A mutual information loss is first proposed to constrain the flow of information in INN. Besides, a two-way fusion module (TWFM) is implemented, utilizing spatial and DCT domain features as auxiliary information to facilitate message extraction. These two designs aid in recovering secret messages from the DCT coefficients losslessly. Experimental results demonstrate that our method yields significantly lower error rates than other existing hiding methods. For example, our method achieves reliable extraction with 0 error rate for 1 bit per pixel (bpp) embedding payload; and under the JPEG compression with quality factor QF=10, the error rate of our method is about 22% lower than the state-of-the-art robust image hiding methods, which demonstrates remarkable robustness against JPEG compression.