Image Steganography Without Embedding Based on Style Transfer and Zero-Watermarking

Currently, most of the existing steganography approaches are built on the basis of embedding. Regardless of how good the cover picture is chosen or how skillful it is, it will result in a variation of the cover image and arouse the suspect of the attacker. This paper presents a new method of non-embedding image steganography in order to accomplish the secret transport task. Firstly, the sender uses the Quaternion Polar Harmonic Fourier Moments (QPHFM) stabilization properties to carry out the key of the primary image. Then, based on the style transfer network, the format of the original cover image is modified and used to transmit on the common channel. As for the receiver, a special destylization network is adopted in the receiver to reconstruct the raw image. Then, we use a key to get the hidden message from the reconstruction of the original image. In the entire transfer, there is no embedding of the secret message, and it is known as non-embedding image steganography. Moreover, even if the key is broken, it will not be taken away by the attacker. The wide range of experiments show that this method is able to accomplish the security and success of secret transfer.