{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,13]],"date-time":"2026-06-13T20:39:18Z","timestamp":1781383158446,"version":"3.54.1"},"reference-count":37,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,4,25]],"date-time":"2023-04-25T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1682380800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100007219","name":"Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["20ZR1421600"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["20ZR1421600"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100007219","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100007219","name":"Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["MIMS21-M-02"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["MIMS21-M-02"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100007219","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Research Fund of Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-source Information Mining &amp; Security","award":["20ZR1421600"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["20ZR1421600"]}]},{"name":"Research Fund of Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-source Information Mining &amp; Security","award":["MIMS21-M-02"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["MIMS21-M-02"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Symmetry"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Recently, the style-based generative adversarial network StyleGAN2 yields state-of-art performance on unconditional high-quality image synthesis. However, from the perspective of steganography, the image security is not guaranteed during the image synthesis. Relying on the optimal properties of StyleGAN2, this paper proposes a noise-optimization stacked StyleGAN2 named NOStyle to generate the secure and high-quality cover (image used for data hiding). In our proposed scheme, we decompose the image synthesis into two stages with symmetrical mode. In stage-I, StyleGAN2 is preserved to generate a high-quality benchmark image. In the stage-II generator, based on the progressive mechanism and shortcut connection, we design a noise secure optimization network by which the different-scale stochastic variation (noise map) is automatically adjusted according to the results of the stage-II discriminator. After injecting the stochastic variation into different resolutions of the synthesis network, the stage-II generator obtains an intermediate image. For the symmetrical stage-II discriminator, we combine the image secure loss and fidelity loss to construct the noise loss which is used to evaluate the difference between two images generated by the stage-I generator and stage-II generator. Taking the outputs of stage-II discriminator as inputs, by iteration, the stage-II generator finally creates the optimal image. Extensive experiments show that the generated image is not only secure but high quality. Moreover, we make a conclusion that the security of the generated image is inverse proportion to the fidelity.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/sym15050979","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,4,26]],"date-time":"2023-04-26T02:30:52Z","timestamp":1682476252000},"page":"979","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Secure Steganographic Cover Generation via a Noise-Optimization Stacked StyleGAN2"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"given":"Jiang","family":"Yu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai 201499, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xiaoyi","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai 201499, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wen","family":"Si","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai 201499, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3385-8164","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fengyong","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai 201399, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Cong","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Computer, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai 201499, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xinpeng","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,4,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ker, A.D., Bas, P., B\u00f6hme, R., Cogranne, R., Craver, S., Filler, T., Fridrich, J., and Pevn\u00fd, T. 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