The traditional cover modification steganography method only has low steganography ability. We propose a steganography method based on the convolutional neural network architecture (Xception) of deep separable convolutional layers in order to solve this problem. The Xception architecture is used for image steganography for the first time, which not only increases the width of the network, but also improves the adaptability of network expansion, and adds different receiving fields to carry out multi-scale information in it. By introducing jump connections, we solved the problems of gradient dissipation and gradient descent in the Xception architecture. After cascading the secret image and the mask image, high-quality images can be reconstructed through the network, which greatly improves the speed of steganography. When hiding, only the secret image and the cover image are cascaded, and then the secret image can be embedded in the cover image through the hidden network in order to obtain the secret image. After extraction, the secret image can be reconstructed by bypassing the secret image through the extraction network. The results show that the results that are obtained by our model have high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), and the average high load capacity is 23.96 bpp (bit per pixel), thus realizing large-capacity image steganography surgery.
Keywords: ResNet; Xception; deep learning; deep separable convolutional neural network; image steganography.