Invisible and Steganalysis-Resistant Deep Image Hiding Based on One-Way Adversarial Invertible Networks

Deep image hiding is a challenging image processing task that aims to hide a secret image into a cover image of equal size perfectly. How to improve the imperceptibility of deep image hiding while ensuring high computational efficiency is a primary challenge. Where imperceptibility means not being visually perceived while not being perceived by the steganalysis model. In this paper, we propose a novel deep image hiding framework called DIH-OAIN (Deep Image Hiding based on One-way Adversarial Invertible Networks) to address it. Firstly, an image cascade framework is introduced to extract image semantics and details with dual-resolution branches, and reduces computation complexity by balancing image resolution and model complexity. Secondly, a hidden probability guided module is designed to constrain the secret image to be hidden in the texture region, utilizing the image texture complexity as prior knowledge. The above two points can effectively improve visual imperceptibility. Finally, a one-way adversarial training strategy is proposed to enhance the model imperceptibility. A series of experimental results show that the proposed method is significantly improved in imperceptibility comparing to state-of-the-art deep image hiding algorithms, while maintaining a low computation complexity.