about
HiDDeN: Hiding Data with Deep Networks (Stanford) (arxiv.org)
2 points by Katydid on Aug 3, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Two networks learn to hide a message in an image as tiny invisible pixel changes, then read it back out. The hidden message survives blurring, cropping, and JPEG compression about as well as standard data-hiding tricks.

Abstract · HiDDeN: Hiding Data With Deep Networks

Recent work has shown that deep neural networks are highly sensitive to tiny perturbations of input images, giving rise to adversarial examples. Though this property is usually considered a weakness of learned models, we explore whether it can be beneficial. We find that neural networks can learn to use invisible perturbations to encode a rich amount of useful information. In fact, one can exploit this capability for the task of data hiding. We jointly train encoder and decoder networks, where given an input message and cover image, the encoder produces a visually indistinguishable encoded image, from which the decoder can recover the original message. We show that these encodings are competitive with existing data hiding algorithms, and further that they can be made robust to noise: our models learn to reconstruct hidden information in an encoded image despite the presence of Gaussian blurring, pixel-wise dropout, cropping, and JPEG compression. Even though JPEG is non-differentiable, we show that a robust model can be trained using differentiable approximations. Finally, we demonstrate that adversarial training improves the visual quality of encoded images.

Jiren Zhu, Russell Kaplan, Justin Johnson, Li Fei-Fei
arXiv:1807.09937 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Jul 26, 2018
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN