Enhancing the security of image steganography via multiple adversarial networks and channel attention modules

Existing steganographic methods based on adversarial images can only design adversarial images for a single steganalyzer and cannot resist detection from the latest steganalyzers using convolutional neural networks such as SRNet and Zhu-Net. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel method for enhancing the security of image steganography using multiple adversarial networks and channel attention modules. The proposed method employs generative adversarial networks based on the U-Net structure to generate high-quality adversarial images and uses the self-learning properties of the adversarial networks to iteratively optimize the parameters of multiple adversarial steganographic networks. This process generates high-quality adversarial images capable of misleading multiple steganalyzers. Additionally, the proposed scheme adaptively adjusts the distribution of adversarial noise in the original image using multiple lightweight channel attention modules in the generator, thus enhancing the anti-steganalysis ability of adversarial images. Furthermore, the proposed method utilizes multiple discrimination losses and MSE loss, dynamically combined to improve the quality of adversarial images and facilitate the network's rapid and stable convergence. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can generate adversarial images with an average PSNR of 40.3 dB, and the success rate of misleading the advanced steganalyzers is over 93%. The security and generalization of the algorithm we propose exceed those of the compared steganographic methods.& COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier Inc.