SMILENet: Unleashing Extra-Large Capacity Image Steganography via a Synergistic Mosaic InvertibLE Hiding Network

Existing image steganography methods face fundamental limitations in hiding capacity (typically 1~7 images) due to severe information interference and uncoordinated capacity-distortion trade-off. We propose SMILENet, a novel synergistic framework that achieves 25 image hiding through three key innovations: (i) A synergistic network architecture coordinates reversible and non-reversible operations to efficiently exploit information redundancy in both secret and cover images. The reversible Invertible Cover-Driven Mosaic (ICDM) module and Invertible Mosaic Secret Embedding (IMSE) module establish cover-guided mosaic transformations and representation embedding with mathematically guaranteed invertibility for distortion-free embedding. The non-reversible Secret Information Selection (SIS) module and Secret Detail Enhancement (SDE) module implement learnable feature modulation for critical information selection and enhancement. (ii) A unified training strategy that coordinates complementary modules to achieve 3.0x higher capacity than existing methods with superior visual quality. (iii) Last but not least, we introduce a new metric to model Capacity-Distortion Trade-off for evaluating the image steganography algorithms that jointly considers hiding capacity and distortion, and provides a unified evaluation approach for accessing results with different number of secret image. Extensive experiments on DIV2K, Paris StreetView and ImageNet1K show that SMILENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of hiding capacity, recovery quality as well as security against steganalysis methods.