DKiS: Decay weight invertible image steganography with private key

Image steganography, defined as the practice of concealing information within another image, traditionally encounters security challenges when its methods become publicly known or are under attack. To address this, a novel private key-based image steganography technique has been introduced. This approach ensures the security of the hidden information, as access requires a corresponding private key, regardless of the public knowledge of the steganography method. Experimental evidence has been presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method and showcasing its real-world applicability. Furthermore, a critical challenge in the invertible image steganography process has been identified by us: the transfer of non-essential, or `garbage', information from the secret to the host pipeline. To tackle this issue, the decay weight has been introduced to control the information transfer, effectively filtering out irrelevant data and enhancing the performance of image steganography. The code for this technique is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yanghangAI/DKiS, and a practical demonstration can be found at http://yanghang.site/hidekey.