Multi-Stage Residual Hiding for Image-into-Audio Steganography
This work addresses the problem of covert communication for individuals and organizations using audio as a carrier, providing a method to hide images without perceptible audio degradation.
This paper proposes a cross-modal steganography method to hide image content within audio carriers. The method uses two multi-stage networks to encode and decode multilevel residual errors, resulting in unnoticeable modifications to the audio and highly intelligible decoded images.
The widespread application of audio communication technologies has speeded up audio data flowing across the Internet, which made it a popular carrier for covert communication. In this paper, we present a cross-modal steganography method for hiding image content into audio carriers while preserving the perceptual fidelity of the cover audio. In our framework, two multi-stage networks are designed: the first network encodes the decreasing multilevel residual errors inside different audio subsequences with the corresponding stage sub-networks, while the second network decodes the residual errors from the modified carrier with the corresponding stage sub-networks to produce the final revealed results. The multi-stage design of proposed framework not only make the controlling of payload capacity more flexible, but also make hiding easier because of the gradual sparse characteristic of residual errors. Qualitative experiments suggest that modifications to the carrier are unnoticeable by human listeners and that the decoded images are highly intelligible.