An End-to-End Framework for Joint Makeup Style Transfer and Image Steganography

Existing image steganography schemes always introduce obvious modification traces to the cover image, resulting in the risk of secret information leakage. To address this issue, an end-to-end framework for joint makeup style transfer and image steganography is proposed in this paper to achieve imperceptible higher-capacity data hiding. In the scheme, a Parsing-guided Semantic Feature Alignment (PSFA) module is designed to transfer the style of a makeup image to an object non-makeup image, thereby generating a content-style integrated feature matrix. Meanwhile, a Multi-Scale Feature Fusion and Data Embedding (MFFDE) module was devised to encode the secret image into its latent features and fuse them with the generated content-style integrated feature matrix, as well as the non-makeup image features across multiple scales, to achieve the makeup-stego image. As a result, the style of the makeup image is well transformed and the secret image is imperceptibly embedded simultaneously without directly modifying the pixels of the original non-makeup image. Additionally, a Residual-aware Information Compensation Network (RICN) is developed to compensate the loss of the secret image arising from the multilevel data embedding, thereby further enhancing the quality of the reconstructed secret image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior steganalysis resistance capability and visual quality in both makeup-stego images and recovered secret images, compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.