Image Steganography Based On Side Information Estimation

Steganography is a hot research direction in the field of information hiding.This technology can embed secret information into public multimedia files without causing suspicion,thus ensuring communication security.In recent years,the introduction of adaptive steganography has significantly improved the security of steganography.How to further improve the security and applicability of steganography is a key issue in the field of steganography.The image formats currently used for steganography mainly include JPEG images and spatial domain images.Steganography methods based on JPEG images typically utilize side information of the original image to improve the security of steganography.However,the existing JPEG steganography methods need to obtain the original images in advance when using the side information.When the original images are not available,the side information cannot be used to design the steganography methods.While spatial images lack a compression process similar to JPEG images,there is less research on spatial image steganography using side information.In this paper,JPEG image and spatial domain image are used as steganographic covers.With adaptive steganography framework,image steganography based on side information estimation is proposed.The security research about this steganography framework is carried out.The research results are as follows:1)JPEG image steganography based on side information estimationFor current JPEG image steganography,most methods cannot use side information to help embed in the absence of the original image.This paper proposes a method for estimating JPEG side information using convolutional neural networks,and then uses the estimated side information to optimize the embedding modification.And the scheme is applied to two existing JPEG adaptive steganography methods JC-UED and J-UNIWARD,and two new steganography methods are obtained.The experimental results show that the scheme improves the security of the original steganography methods by using the estimated side information when only the JPEG cover image can be obtained.2)JPEG image steganography using cost modulation factorBased on the JPEG steganography method based on side information estimation,the cost modulation factor is introduced to further improve the security of steganography.After obtaining the estimated side information of the DCT coefficients,the directions of the modification are not directly determined,but the modulation factor is used to modulate the distortion costs of the corresponding modification direction.The method can further make full use of the estimated side information,and simultaneously apply the ternary STC code for embedding,thereby further improving the security of steganography.The experimental results show that this method has the highest antidetection ability compared with the other two steganography methods without the original image,and can maintain high anti-detection ability under the condition of high payloads.3)Spatial image steganography based on side information estimationIn the aspect of spatial image steganography,the idea based on side information estimation is applied to spatial image steganography.The side information of the spatial image is usually obtained from the source image using some information-reducing operation.Without the source image,the proposed method uses a super-resolution method SR-CNN to perform super-resolution calculation on the cover image,and then calculates the estimated side information through the down-sampling algorithm.The original spatial steganography method is improved by using the estimated side information and the cost modulation factor to modulate the costs of pixels.The experimental results show that the spatial image steganography method based on side information estimation can improve the security performance of the original steganography method to some extent.In this paper,the image steganography method based on side information estimation is studied.Using JPEG image and spatial domain image as covers,a JPEG image steganography method based on side information estimation is proposed.Based on this method,JPEG image steganography method using cost modulation factor and Spatial image steganography method based on side information estimation are proposed.The security performance of the original steganography methods is improved.