ENHANCING IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY VIA STEGO GENERATION AND SELECTION

Unlike most existing steganography methods which are mainly focused on designing embedding cost, in this paper, we propose a new method to enhance existing steganographic methods via stego generation and selection. The proposed method firstly trains a steganalytic network according to the steganography to be enhanced, and then tries to adjust a tiny part of original embedding costs based on the magnitudes of it and the corresponding gradients obtained from the pre-trained network, and generates many candidate stegos in a random manner. Finally, the method selects a stego according to its image residual distance to cover. Extensive experimental results have shown that the proposed method can siginficantly enhance the security performance of current steganography in spatial domain against four steganalytic classifiers. In addition, comparative analysis between original stegos and the resulting ones with the proposed method are given.