Steganography in stylized images
Nan Zhong, Zhenxing Qian, Zichi Wang, Xinpeng Zhang · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2019
We propose a steganographic scheme for stylized images. Given a natural image, an image style transfer algorithm is executed twice to produce two similar stylized images with different parameters. One of them is used for embedding and another one is employed as a reference. For the cover image, embedding costs are assigned to measure the detection risk of the modifications. Each embedding cost is then asymmetrically adjusted into two polarity costs to further measure the detection risk of different modification polarities with the guidance of the reference image. After embedding with syndrome-trellis coding, the difference of the stegoimage and the reference image is minimized, which results in a high undetectability against steganalysis. Experimental results also prove that the proposed scheme performs much better than the existing steganographic methods when examined by modern steganalytic tools.