Stable Messenger: Steganography for Message-Concealed Image Generation
This work addresses the need for more robust information protection in digital communications through improved steganography methods, representing an incremental advancement in the field.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating and improving steganographic image generation by introducing a new 'message accuracy' metric that assesses entire decoded messages rather than individual bits, and proposes a Log-Sum-Exponential loss function and latent-aware encoding technique that significantly enhance message accuracy while maintaining image quality.
In the ever-expanding digital landscape, safeguarding sensitive information remains paramount. This paper delves deep into digital protection, specifically focusing on steganography. While prior research predominantly fixated on individual bit decoding, we address this limitation by introducing ``message accuracy'', a novel metric evaluating the entirety of decoded messages for a more holistic evaluation. In addition, we propose an adaptive universal loss tailored to enhance message accuracy, named Log-Sum-Exponential (LSE) loss, thereby significantly improving the message accuracy of recent approaches. Furthermore, we also introduce a new latent-aware encoding technique in our framework named \Approach, harnessing pretrained Stable Diffusion for advanced steganographic image generation, giving rise to a better trade-off between image quality and message recovery. Throughout experimental results, we have demonstrated the superior performance of the new LSE loss and latent-aware encoding technique. This comprehensive approach marks a significant step in evolving evaluation metrics, refining loss functions, and innovating image concealment techniques, aiming for more robust and dependable information protection.