Image Steganography Based on Foreground Object Generation by Generative Adversarial Networks in Mobile Edge Computing with Internet of Things

Abstract

Mobile edge computing provides low-latency service computing for the Internet of Things (IoT). Considering the computational cost of high-quality image steganography in practical mobile applications, we believe that mobile edge computing could provide real-time service computing for covert communications. As a mainstream approach to convert communication, image steganographic algorithms prefer to hide secret data in well-textured regions in order to reduce the possibility of being detected. Recently, the generative adversarial networks (GAN) has become one of the most popular architectures for image steganography. However, the GAN-based image steganographic algorithms directly conduct the secret data embedding on the entire cover images and do not sufficiently take the regional texture complexity into account, which will compromise the anti-detection ability. To address this issue, we propose a novel image steganographic algorithm on the generated foreground object region with rich textures. More specifically, the foreground object region is generated onto a given cover image by the GAN, and the secret data is embedded in the foreground object region simultaneously during the generation of the region. The experimental results show that the proposed method can resist steganalysis effectively without significant degradation of image quality and achieve real-time processing.