No Prompt, No Leaks: A Robust Generative Steganography Framework via Prompt-Free Diffusion
This work addresses the problem of robust and reliable generative image steganography for secure communication, offering a prompt-free approach that improves upon existing LDM-based methods.
The paper proposes a prompt-free diffusion image steganography framework that integrates style semantic priors to generate high-quality stego images and accurately recover secret images, achieving competitive performance in security, reconstruction accuracy, and controllability.
Generative image steganography synthesizes stego images directly from secret information to achieve inherent security advantages. Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have recently emerged as a fundamental image steganography framework that modulates secret latent representations with text prompts. Limited by the inflexibility of text prompts, these methods still struggle to generate high-quality stego images and accurately recover secret images. In this work, we propose a prompt-free diffusion image steganography framework that integrates style semantic priors to control more robust and reliable stego image generation. Specifically, a Cascaded Affine Coupling Module (CACM) establishes a bijective, deterministic mapping between a secret image and its latent representation. Then, style semantics are integrated into the diffusion process to control latent representation and ensure visual imperceptibility in the generated stego images. To mitigate trajectory deviations stemming from the unconditioned reverse process, a predictor-corrector mechanism is introduced to iteratively refine the generation trajectory via feedback from the current and predicted next states. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of security, secret image reconstruction accuracy and controllability.