{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,24]],"date-time":"2026-02-24T07:24:33Z","timestamp":1771917873471,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":32,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,28]],"date-time":"2022-08-28T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1661644800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["72071209"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["72071209"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["72001214"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["72001214"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The development of Internet technology has provided great convenience for data transmission and sharing, but it also brings serious security problems that are related to data protection. As is detailed in this paper, an enhanced steganography network was designed to protect secret image data that contains private or confidential information; this network consists of a concealing network and a revealing network in order to achieve image embedding and recovery separately. To reduce the system\u2019s computation complexity, we constructed the network\u2019s framework using a down\u2013up structure in order to compress the intermediate feature maps. In order to mitigate the input\u2019s information loss caused by a sequence of convolution blocks, the long skip concatenation method was designed to pass the raw information to the top layer, thus synthesizing high-quality hidden images with fine texture details. In addition, we propose a novel strategy called non-activated feature fusion (NAFF), which is designed to provide stronger supervision for synthetizing higher-quality hidden images and recovered images. In order to further boost the hidden image\u2019s visual quality and enhance its imperceptibility, an attention mechanism-based enhanced module was designed to reconstruct and enhance the salient target, thus covering up and obscuring the embedded secret content. Furthermore, a hybrid loss function that is composed of pixel domain loss and structure domain loss was designed to boost the hidden image\u2019s structural quality and visual security. Our experimental results demonstrate that, due to the elaborate design of the network structure and loss function, our proposed method achieves high levels of imperceptibility and security.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e24091203","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,29]],"date-time":"2022-08-29T01:39:19Z","timestamp":1661737159000},"page":"1203","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["An Enhanced Steganography Network for Concealing and Protecting Secret Image Data"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"24","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3130-9273","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Feng","family":"Chen","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Air Defense and Anti-Missile, Air Force Engineering University, Xi\u2019an 710051, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Qinghua","family":"Xing","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Air Defense and Anti-Missile, Air Force Engineering University, Xi\u2019an 710051, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0079-9882","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bing","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"China Satellite Maritime Tracking and Control Department, Jiangyin 214430, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6388-1720","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xuehu","family":"Yan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei 230037, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jingwen","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei 230037, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,28]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4674","DOI":"10.1109\/TII.2018.2855198","article-title":"Deploying Fog Computing in Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0","volume":"14","author":"Aazam","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. 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