Open Access

ARTICLE

Coverless Image Steganography Based on Image Segmentation

Yuanjing Luo¹, Jiaohua Qin^{1, *}, Xuyu Xiang¹, Yun Tan¹, Zhibin He¹, Neal N. Xiong²

1 College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Central South University of Forestry & Technology, Changsha, 410114, China.
2 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, 74464, USA.

* Corresponding Author: Jiaohua Qin. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 64(2), 1281-1295. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010867

Received 02 April 2020; Accepted 17 April 2020; Issue published 10 June 2020

Abstract

To resist the risk of the stego-image being maliciously altered during transmission, we propose a coverless image steganography method based on image segmentation. Most existing coverless steganography methods are based on whole feature mapping, which has poor robustness when facing geometric attacks, because the contents in the image are easy to lost. To solve this problem, we use ResNet to extract semantic features, and segment the object areas from the image through Mask RCNN for information hiding. These selected object areas have ethical structural integrity and are not located in the visual center of the image, reducing the information loss of malicious attacks. Then, these object areas will be binarized to generate hash sequences for information mapping. In transmission, only a set of stego-images unrelated to the secret information are transmitted, so it can fundamentally resist steganalysis. At the same time, since both Mask RCNN and ResNet have excellent robustness, pre-training the model through supervised learning can achieve good performance. The robust hash algorithm can also resist attacks during transmission. Although image segmentation will reduce the capacity, multiple object areas can be extracted from an image to ensure the capacity to a certain extent. Experimental results show that compared with other coverless image steganography methods, our method is more robust when facing geometric attacks.

---

Keywords

---

Citations