Stéganographie d'images neuronale sans canal auxiliaire et prenant en compte la fiabilité, avec récupération autonome de la charge utile

Stéganographie d'images neuronale sans canal auxiliaire et prenant en compte la fiabilité, avec récupération autonome de la charge utile · UY1 Research Hub

Résumé

<div> Operational side channels remain a practical source of leakage in some high-capacity image steganography systems. WYSAWIS, a recent coverless indexing method, avoids pixel modification but relies on cloud-carried location information for extraction. We investigate a different operating point: CRC-verified payload recovery from one transmitted image without folder positions, block-index lists, or external location metadata. We propose ETHEGAN, an auxiliarychannel-free neural image steganography framework with a self-contained packet layer containing payload length, CRC32 validation, Reed-Solomon parity, deterministic interleaving, and optional reliability-aware erasure decoding. We further add residual-statistics regularization and a lightweight adversarial residual-domain discriminator to reduce visible and statistical embedding artifacts. On fixed 100-image Caltech101 and COCO val2017 clean-channel subsets at 0.25 nominal bpp, corresponding to 0.185546875 effective user bpp after packet and error-correction overhead, ETHEGAN recovers 100/100 Caltech101 payloads and 93/100 COCO payloads exactly after ECC and CRC validation. Increasing Reed-Solomon parity from 64 to 128 bytes per chunk lowers the effective user payload to 0.123046875 bpp and recovers 100/100 payloads on both datasets. Residual-strength and steganalysis-aware ablations preserve 50/50 exact recovery on both 50-image subsets while improving PSNR relative to the initial residual baseline. A lightweight residual/LSB detector remains effective over three grouped train/test splits, with mean test AUC 0.9835 on Caltech101 and 0.8763 on COCO. JPEG compression, blur, and resizing yield 0/20 exact recoveries in both datasets. A conservative low-payload detectability-gated mode at 0.001953125 effective bpp accepts 10/40 candidate images, recovers all accepted payloads, and yields test AUC 0.58 for the lightweight detector and 0.52 for a SPAM-style residual cooccurrence detector. An AES-256-GCM pre-packet encryption wrapper also passes correct-key, wrong-key, and wrong-associated-data authentication tests. The supported contribution is therefore clean-channel, auxiliary-channel-free payload recovery with effective-capacity accounting, optional confidential payload transport, and detector-bounded passive security only in the lowpayload gated mode; robustness remains unsupported. </div>

Stéganographie d'images neuronale sans canal auxiliaire et prenant en compte la fiabilité, avec récupération autonome de la charge utile (ouvre dans un nouvel onglet)

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Université de Yaoundé I

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