Robust data hiding for JPEG images with invertible neural network

JPEG compression will cause severe distortion to the shared compressed image, which brings great challenges to extracting messages correctly from the stego image. To address such challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end robust data hiding scheme for JPEG images. The embedding and extracting secret messages on the quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients are implemented by the bi-directional process of the invertible neural network (INN), which can provide intrinsic robustness against lossy JPEG compression. We design a JPEG compression attack module to simulate the JPEG compression process, which helps the network automatically learn how to recover the secret message from JPEG compressed image. Experimental results have demonstrated that our method achieves strong robustness against lossy JPEG compression, and also significantly improves the security compared with the existing data hiding methods on the premise of ensuring image quality and high capacity. For example, the detection error of our method against XuNet has been increased by 3.45% over the existing data hiding methods.