StegaStyleGAN: Towards Generic and Practical Generative Image Steganography

Abstract

The recent advances in generative image steganography have drawn increasing attention due to their potential for provable security and bulk embedding capacity. However, existing generative steganographic schemes are usually tailored for specific tasks and are hardly applied to applications with practical constraints. To address this issue, this paper proposes a generic generative image steganography scheme called Steganography StyleGAN (StegaStyleGAN) that meets the practical objectives of security, capacity, and robustness within the same framework. In StegaStyleGAN, a novel Distribution-Preserving Secret Data Modulator (DP-SDM) is used to achieve provably secure generative image steganography by preserving the data distribution of the model inputs. Additionally, a generic and efficient Secret Data Extractor (SDE) is invented for accurate secret data extraction. By choosing whether to incorporate the Image Attack Simulator (IAS) during the training process, one can obtain two models with different parameters but the same structure (both generator and extractor) for lossless and lossy channel covert communication, namely StegaStyleGAN-Ls and StegaStyleGAN-Ly. Furthermore, by mating with GAN inversion, conditional generative steganography can be achieved as well. Experimental results demonstrate that, whether for lossless or lossy communication channels, the proposed StegaStyleGAN can significantly outperform the corresponding state-of-the-art schemes.