Abstract:With the development of deep learning and steganography, deep neural networks are widely used in image steganography, especially in a new research direction, namely embedding an image message in an image. The mainstream steganography of embedding an image message in an image based on deep neural networks requires cover images and secret images to be input into a steganographic model to generate stego-images. But recent studies have demonstrated that the steganographic model only needs secret images as input, and then the output secret perturbation is added to cover images, so as to embed secret images. This novel embedding method that does not rely on cover images greatly expands the application scenarios of steganography and realizes the universality of steganography. However, this method currently only verifies the feasibility of embedding and recovering secret images, and the more important evaluation criterion for steganography, namely concealment, has not been considered and verified. This study proposes a high-capacity universal steganography generative adversarial network (USGAN) model based on an attention mechanism. By using the attention module, the USGAN encoder can adjust the perturbation intensity distribution of the pixel position on the channel dimension in the secret image, thereby reducing the influence of the secret perturbation on the cover images. In addition, in this study, the CNN-based steganalyzer is used as the target model of USGAN, and the encoder learns to generate a secret adversarial perturbation through adversarial training with the target model so that the stego-image can become an adversarial example for attacking the steganalyzer at the same time. The experimental results show that the proposed model can not only realize a universal embedding method that does not rely on cover images but also further improves the concealment of steganography.