Camouflage generative adversarial network: Coverless full-image-to-image hiding

Abstract

Image hiding, one of the most important data hiding techniques, is widely used to enhance cybersecurity when transmitting multimedia data. In recent years, deep learning based image hiding algorithms have been designed to improve the embedding capacity whilst maintaining sufficient imperceptibility to malicious eavesdroppers. These methods can hide a full-size secret image into a cover image, thus allowing full-image-to image hiding. However, these methods suffer from a trade off challenge to balance the possibility of detection from the container image against the recovery quality of secret image. In this paper, we propose Camouflage Generative Adversarial Network (Cam-GAN), a novel two-stage coverless full-image to-image hiding method named, to tackle this problem. Our method offers a hiding solution through image synthesis to avoid using a modified cover image as the image hiding container and thus enhancing both image hiding imperceptibility and recovery quality of secret images. Our experimental results demonstrate that Cam-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art full-image-to-image hiding algorithms on both aspects