Robust Invertible Image Steganography

Youmin Xu, Chong Mou, Yujie Hu, Jingfen Xie, Jian Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 7875-7884

Image steganography aims to hide secret images into a container image, where the secret is hidden from human vision and can be restored when necessary. Previous image steganography methods are limited in hiding capacity and robustness, commonly vulnerable to distortion on container images such as Gaussian noise, Poisson noise, and lossy compression. This paper presents a novel flow-based framework for robust invertible image steganography, dubbed as RIIS. We introduce the conditional normalizing flow to model the distribution of the redundant high-frequency component with the condition of the container image. Moreover, a well-designed container enhancement module (CEM) also contributes to the robust reconstruction. To regulate the network parameters for different distortion levels, we propose a distortion-guided modulation (DGM) over flow-based blocks to make it a one-size-fits-all model. In terms of both clean and distorted image steganography, extensive experiments reveal that the proposed RIIS efficiently improves the robustness while maintaining imperceptibility and capacity. As far as we know, we are the first learning-based scheme to enhance the robustness of image steganography in the literature. The guarantee of steganography robustness significantly broadens the application of steganography in real-world applications.