Research on steganographic encryption of optical images with high invisibility based on HiIS-Net and ghost imaging

Abstract In this paper, a steganographic network based on the attention mechanism of squeeze excitation network channel for high-invisibility images of secret information is proposed, which combines ghost imaging technology to realize high-invisibility hiding and encryption of equal-size images. Compared with the image steganography network used in ghost imaging, it improves the concealment and image quality of the secret information in steganography images. Among them, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of steganographic images is increased by about 2 dB. At the same time, the PSNR of the extracted secret images was also improved by about 1.1 dB. Ghost imaging technology is used to encrypt the steganographic image into a series of meaningless light intensity sequence values, which greatly improves the security of the encryption system. The feasibility, safety and robustness of the proposed method are verified by experiments and simulations. This paper provides a new idea for the study of optical image encryption.