RIHINNet: A robust image hiding method against JPEG compression based on invertible neural network

Abstract Image hiding is a task that embeds secret images in digital images without being detected. The performance of image hiding has been greatly improved by using the invertible neural network. However, current image hiding methods are less robust in the face of Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression. The secret image cannot be extracted from the stego image after JPEG compression of the stego image. Some methods show good robustness for some certain JPEG compression quality factors but poor robustness for other common JPEG compression quality factors. An image‐hiding network (RIHINNet) that is robust to all common JPEG compression quality factors is proposed. First of all, the loss function is redesigned; thus, the secret image is hidden as much as possible in the area that is less likely to be changed after JPEG compression. Second, the classifier is designed, which can help the model to select the extractor according to the range of JPEG compression degree. Finally, the interval robustness of the secret image extraction is improved through the design of a denoising module. Experimental results show that this RIHINNet outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art image‐hiding methods in the face of JPEG compressed noise with random compression quality factors, with more than 10 dB peak signal‐to‐noise ratio improvement in secret image recovery on ImageNet, COCO and DIV2K datasets.