SIHNet: A safe image hiding method with less information leaking

Abstract Image hiding is a task that hides secret images into cover images. The purposes of image hiding are to ensure the secret images are invisible to the human and the secret images can be recovered. The current state‐of‐the‐art steganography methods run the risk of secret information leakage. A safe image hiding network (SIHNet) is presented to reduce the leakage of secret information. Based on some phenomena of image hiding methods which use invertible neural network, a reversible secret image processing (SIP) module is proposed to make the secret images suitable for hiding and make the stego images leak less secret information. Besides, a reversible lost information hiding (LIH) module is used to hide the lost information into the cover images, thus the method can recover the secret images better than the method that uses random noise to replace the lost information. Experimental results show that SIHNet outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art methods on the PSNR and SSIM values of the recovered secret images and the stego images. Besides, residual images of other state‐of‐the‐art methods all contain information about secret images while residual images of SIHNet leak almost no secret information. Thus the method can prevent the listener of transmission channel from obtaining the information of the secret image through the residual image, which means SIHNet performs better in security than other state‐of‐the‐art methods.