Enhancing Secure Data Transmission Through Deep Learning-Based Image Steganography and Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks

In the era of multimedia technology digital images are essential and keeping them safe from unauthorised access is crucial. To address this issue, the proposed research explores the intersection of image steganography and deep learning for enhanced secure data transmission. It proposes a unique approach that leverages skip-connection-based residual network to extract semantic features and reconstruct images for secure data transmission. This paper introduces a novel steganographic approach combining LSB embedding with sprite image generation instead of directly using image features. Hence, the proposed method effectively hides data within images while maintaining high invisibility. Furthermore, Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) is employed to improve the quality of the reconstructed images. Several other custom and state-of-art convolutional architectures have also been investigated for semantic feature extraction and image reconstruction, including Convolutional Autoencoders (CAE), Deep convolutional network (DCN), DenseNet, InceptionNet and the XceptionNet model, etc. for the comprehensive comparisons against the proposed model. The proposed technique proved to be the best performing model with an SSIM value of 1.00 and PSNR value of 33.04 on the test data. Overall, this research work combines deep learning with steganography to create a secure and hidden communication method.