Aiming at the problem that traditional information hiding is difficult to resist the detection of steganalysis algorithms, this paper proposes a coverless data hiding method based on image classification and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) extraction. Firstly, an original image database is classified by using Faster R-CNN to generate different kinds of sub-image databases. Secondly, a robust hashing scheme is designed by using the direction information of SIFT feature points of the image, with which the image hash value of each sub-image database is calculated, and all images in each sub-image databases are mapped to corresponding binary hash values. Finally, secret information is divided into several segments, and by comparing the secret information segments with the binary hash values of all the images, the images corresponding to the secret information segments are retrieved from the sub-image database. These images are transmitted to the receiver as the carrier containing the secret to complete the information hiding process. The receiver receives all the stego-images, and extracts the secret information according to the agreed hashing scheme. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method is robust to JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise, image scaling and other attacks, and the performance of hiding capacity is also improved.
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