Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022

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Knowledge-Based Systems
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys

A data hiding scheme based on U-Net and wavelet transform

∗
Lianshan Liu a , , Lingzhuang Meng a , Yanjun Peng a , Xiaoli Wang b
a
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266+590, China
b
Office of Network Security and Informatization, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266+590, China

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: As deep learning was used in the field of data hiding, the capacity of data hiding had been greatly
Received 8 February 2021 increased. In addition, the wavelet transform in the traditional data hiding technology performed well,
Received in revised form 22 March 2021 and the hidden image was invisible compared with the spatial domain scheme A data hiding scheme
Accepted 6 April 2021
based on U-Net and wavelet transform was proposed in this paper, which innovatively combined the
Available online 8 April 2021
advantages of U-Net in image detail feature processing and the ability of wavelet transform to divide
Keywords: image details. Data hiding and extraction were realized through the jointly trained hidden network
Deep learning and extraction network respectively. The wavelet coefficients of the secret data were hidden in the
Neural network image through the hidden network, and a hidden image with good visual effects could be obtained. The
U-Net image feature was subdivided into four wavelet coefficients in the extraction network, and finally the
Wavelet transform secret data image was obtained through inverse wavelet transform. The experimental results shown
Data hiding that the proposed scheme had better hidden data invisibility than the traditional scheme, and the data
extraction was more accurate.
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction schemes. Meng et al. [10] proposed a reversible watermarking

With the advancement of science and technology, people pay
more and more attention to information security. Image data
hiding is a scheme that hided secret data into natural images
or medical images [1], and transmits confidential data through
public image. It is mostly used in information encryption and
special fields such as medical and judicial image transmission [2].
Because the confidential data involved is often of high value, data
hiding is of great significance in practical applications. Increasing
the data hiding capacity and the robustness of hiding schemes
while hiding data has become the focus of research.
Traditional data hiding schemes included spatial domain and
transform domain methods. The spatial scheme used the redun-
dant information between pixels, including Least Significant Bits
(LSB), histogram, differential expansion, etc. [3,4]. The amount of
redundant information that could be used in this scheme was lim-
ited, so the capacity was low. The transform domain used Discrete
Cosine Transform (DCT) [5], Wavelet Transform (WT) [6,7], etc.
to adjust the image to the transform domain, and then used the
redundant information between the obtained coefficients or other
schemes for data hiding.
Wavelet transform performed well in data hiding. The scheme
using wavelet transform [8–10] had good visual effects and was
invisible, which had great advantages compared to spatial domain
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: liulianshan@sdust.edu.cn (L. Liu).
scheme based on lifting Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), which
could achieve complete reversible extraction and recovery, and
guarantee the validity of secret data.
As traditional schemes were difficult to meet the increasing
security and capacity requirements, the latest research focused
on the use of neural networks [11] or augmented reality [12]
schemes for data hiding. Compared with traditional data hiding
and watermarking schemes, neural network schemes tended to
have higher capacity and robustness. Most of the previous wa-
termarking schemes embedded binary data in gray-scale or color
image [13,14], while neural network. The scheme was more to
hide grayscale image into color image, or even hided color image
into color image. At the same time, the use of neural networks
for data hiding had good robustness and had the ability to resist
traditional geometric attacks [15,16].
Baluja [17] proposed a steganography scheme using deep
learning: Deep Steganography. This scheme used the Preparation
Network to normalize the image, then embedded the secret
data through the Hidden Network, and finally obtained the se-
cret image according to the Reveal Network. Subsequently, CNN
was introduced into the field of data hiding [18–20]. Rehman
et al. [18] used CNN to realized data hiding and extraction. He
proposed an encoder and a decoder, and used a joint loss function
for end-to-end training. Chen et al. [20] proposed a highly robust
optimization scheme for the scheme similar to [18]. This scheme
not only had a large capacity but also resisted traditional image
attacks.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2021.107022
0950-7051/© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al.
Fig. 1. U-Net network structure.
Liu et al. [21,22] combined DenseNet with wavelet sequence
mapping and proposed a coverless image steganography algo-
rithm. Such a scheme could effectively resist the existing ste-
ganalysis tools, and its robustness was high. However, its hiding
capacity was very small. Data hiding schemes based on GAN net-
work [23,24] and Faster-RCNN [25] both had good visual effects,
but they also faced the problem of small capacity. Duan et al. [26]
proposed an information hiding scheme based on Residual Net-
work, which used the residual block connection method to sup-
plement the lack of features, and had a larger hiding capacity than
similar solutions.
Ronneberger et al. [27] proposed U-Net for biomedical image
segmentation in 2015. This network could not only extract and
analyze image features, but also restored to an image with a high
degree of similarity to the original image based on the underlying
and high-level features. Due to the good recovery effect, U-Net
performed well in various applications such as image segmen-
tation [28] and image generation [29]. In the latest research,
Ouahabi et al. [30] proposed a network for semantic segmentation
of medical images: FCdDNet. This scheme improved segmentation
efficiency and robustness while ensuring high accuracy, which
was a greater improvement compared to U-Net. Gu et al. [31]
proposed the CE-Net network structure for medical image seg-
mentation, which had certain advantages over U-Net in some
detail segmentation.
Duan et al. [32] proposed a scheme of using U-Net for data
hiding. This scheme realized hiding the color image into the color
image, and had a higher visual effect and a larger embedding
ability.
Based on the existing U-Net network and the application of
neural network in the field of data hiding, a data hiding scheme
based on U-Net and wavelet transform was proposed in this pa-
per. The proposed scheme adopted a fully convolutional network
structure similar to U-Net, and innovatively used the wavelet
transform and inverse wavelet transform to hide and extract net-
works respectively. The ability of wavelet transform to segment
image details and the ability of U-Net to extract and correct
image features were combined in this scheme, thereby a hid-
den network with good hiding effect and an extraction network
with good recovery effect were obtained. Experimental results
shown that the proposed scheme had better visual effects and
performance than other schemes when the embedding rate was
similar.
2. Related works
2.1. U-Net
U-Net was proposed by Ronneberger et al. in 2015 and was
widely used in medical image segmentation and natural image
2
Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022
generation. Its network structure was shown in Fig. 1. The net-
work used four downsampling and four upsampling, and cropped
and connected the stages of the same level. The combination of
convolutional network and pooling layer realized the network’s
extraction and recognition of image features. The network input
image size was 572×572, but the output size was 388×388,
which shown that after network processing, the output result
does not completely correspond to the original image.
In U-Net, the scheme of replicating and connecting from the
bottom network to the high-level network played a key role. This
type of skip connection added semantic information at the high
level, and refined the contour at the bottom level, so the resulting
image was more refined. Therefore, the image obtained by using
U-Net for image segmentation or image generation was highly
consistent with the detailed features of the original image, which
could capture some abstract features of the image and improve
the final visual effect.
2.2. Wavelet transform
Wavelet transform (WT) was a true mathematical microscope,
which allowed us to use exponential spectrum to describe the
complexity of ‘‘monofractal’’ and ‘‘multifractal’’ objects [33], and
was widely used in image processing. The image was upgraded
from spatial domain to wavelet domain through WT. The co-
efficients obtained by WT contain different detailed features of
the original image. At this time, the operation on the image was
no longer a simple LSB change, but an operation for wavelet
coefficients.
This article used the ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform (HWT) [34] to
process the image. The HWT could be expressed in the form of
A = HBH T , where B was the N × N image matrix and H was the
N × N ‘‘haar’’ transformation matrix, and from this, the N × N
haar basis function hk (Z ) was generated, which was defined on
the interval Z ∈ [0, 1] for k = 0, 1, 2, . . . , N − 1, where N = 2n .
1
h0 (Z ) = h00 (Z ) = √ (1)
N⎧
p/2 q−0.5
⎨2
⎪ q−1
2p
≤Z < 2p
1 q−0.5
hk (Z ) = hpq (Z ) = √ −2p/2 ≤ Z < q/2 p (2)
2p
N ⎪
0 other w ise
⎩
p
where k = 2 + q − 1, if p = 0, then 0 ≤ p ≤ n − 1, q = 0 or 1, and
if p ̸ = 0, then 1 ≤ q ≤ 2p . When N = 4, the wavelet transform
matrix H4 could be obtained as follows:
⎡
1 1 1 1
⎤
1 ⎢√1 1
√ −1 −1 ⎥
H4 = √ ⎣⎢ ⎥ (3)
4 2 − 2 √0 0 ⎦
√
0 0 2 − 2
The steps of the two-order ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform of the
image were as follows: first performed the ‘‘haar’’ wavelet trans-
form on the rows of the pixel matrix to obtain two matrices LF
and HF, and then perform the ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform on the
columns of the two matrices to obtain four components A, H, V,
and D. The transformation order of rows and columns did not
affect the result. The schematic diagram of image decomposition
and restoration by the two-order ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform was
shown in Fig. 2.
The ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform divided the image into four
details. Among the obtained components, A was an approximate
component, which contained higher energy and was the closest
to the original image. H and V were the horizontal and vertical
components, which contained detailed features in the horizontal
and vertical directions. D was the diagonal component, with only
part of the contour, included the feature of the diagonal direction.
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al.
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform (HWT) and inverse transform (iHWT).
3. Proposed scheme
Since U-Net and WT had advantages in image processing,
a data hiding network structure based on U-Net and wavelet
transform was proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme in-
novatively introduced wavelet transform into the neural network
structure, and used a layer skip connection similar to U-Net to
improve the visual effect of the hidden image. At the same time,
by connecting different wavelet components with different fea-
ture layers, the invisibility of the secret data in the carrier image
was improved. The program included a data hiding network and a
data extraction network. The loss functions of the two networks
were weighted and summed to obtain the loss function during
training.
3.1. Hiding network
The hidden network used a network structure similar to U-Net
to hide secret data into the carrier image. The specific struc-
ture was shown in Fig. 3. An RGB carrier image with a size
of 256×256×3 and a gray-scale secret image with a size of
256×256 were used as network input, and an RGB image with
a size of 256×256×3 was used as an output. The network con-
tained multiple layer skip connections and did not use crop
cutting, which preserved the characteristics of the carrier image
to the greatest extent and improved the visual effect of the
resulting image. The secret image was first subjected to WT,
and then the four components were respectively subjected to
convolution operation and connected to the network. Since the
energy contained in the four components was different, they
were connected to different network layers after convolution
feature extraction. Such a connection scheme not only retained
the characteristics of the secret image, but also minimized the
impact on the carrier image.
The structure of the hidden network included 7 downsam-
pling and 7 upsampling, which were implemented by convolution
operation (Conv) and deconvolution operation (DeConv) respec-
tively. Among them, downsampling used ReLU as the activation
function, upsampling used LeakyReLU as the activation function,
and the output layer used Sigmoid as the activation function.
Except for the first layer, the last layer, and the convolution
operation at the bottom of the ‘‘U’’ shape, all other layers used
BN to speed up network operations. All convolutions and de-
convolutions used 4×4 convolution kernels with a step size of
2.
3.2. Extraction network
The extraction network was designed as a fully convolutional
network. The input was an RGB image with a size of 256×256×3,
and the output was a gray secret image with a size of 256×256.
The specific structure was shown in Fig. 4. In the extraction
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Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022
network, the bottom layer features were divided into four parts
(each part had the same parameters and was regarded as the
same layer), and four components with a size of 128×128 were
obtained respectively. The secret image was obtained through
inverse WT.
The extraction network used three convolutional layers and
four deconvolutional layers (including ten deconvolution opera-
tions). The convolution layer used ReLU as the activation func-
tion, the deconvolution layer used LeakyReLU as the activation
function, and both convolution and deconvolution used BN to
accelerate training (except for the last layer of deconvolution).
The first five layers (convolution or deconvolution) used a 4×4
convolution kernel with a step size of 2. The convolution kernel
used in the last two layers of deconvolution is 3×3, and the step
size is 1.
3.3. Loss function
The evaluation criteria of traditional image data hiding
schemes included PSNR, MSE, etc., which were used to quantify
the difference between the original carrier image and the hid-
den image, or the difference between the secret data and the
extracted data. Therefore, the MSE was used as the model loss
function in this paper. In the hidden network, MSE was used
to measure the difference between the carrier image and the
hidden image, and in the extraction network, the MSE was used to
measure the difference between the secret data and the extracted
data. The MSE function equation was as follows:
M N
1 ∑ ∑
MSE(I , I ′ ) = (Ii,j − Ii′,j )2 (4)
M ×N
i=1 j=1
where I , I ′ meant two matrices for MSE operation, and M, N
meant the length and width of the matrix. The loss function of
the data hiding network was expressed as:
loss1 = MSE (I , Ia ) (5)
where I , Ia respectively represented the original carrier image
and the hidden image. The loss function of the data extraction
network was expressed as:
loss2 =MSE A, A′ + MSE H, H′ + MSE V, V′ + MSE(D, D′ )
( ) ( ) ( )
(6)
where A, A represented the approximate components obtained
′
by performing ‘‘haar’’ wavelet transform on the secret data image
and the extracted data. Similarly, H, H′ , V, V′ and D, D′ repre-
sented the horizontal, vertical and diagonal components of the
secret data and the extracted data.
During the training process, it was very necessary for each task
to learn at a similar speed, that is, the loss level of different tasks
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al.
Fig. 3. Hidden network structure diagram.
Fig. 4. Extracting network structure diagram.
was close. Therefore, it was achieved by weighted summation of
the loss of different tasks, as follows:
Loss = µ × loss1 + (1 − µ) × loss2 (7)
where µ ∈ (0, 1) represented the weight of each task. The loss
function used Adam optimization algorithm and backpropagation
algorithm to obtain the optimal network parameters. At the same
time, the network learning rate lr was attenuated according to
epoch, as follows:
epoch
lr = lr × λn , n = (8)
epoch_size
where λ was the decay rate, and epoch_size was the number
of learning rate decay intervals. The data hiding and extraction
network was trained in task learning, that is, the output of the
hidden network was used as the input of the extraction network.
In the process of continuously optimized learning and adjusting
the learning rate, two corresponding network models with the
lowest image difference were obtained.
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Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022
4. Experimental and results analysis
In this paper, the network used the images in the VOC 2012
dataset and the ImageNet dataset for training. Among them,
60,000 images were trained and 7000 images were tested. The
secret image selected the traditional data hiding experimental
image and some images in ImageNet (the grayscale image was
converted from the color image). The experimental environment
was pytho3.6+pytorch, and the hardware used GPU: Tesla V100.
In the continuous training process, the following optimal param-
eters were obtained: the initial network learning rate lr = 0.001,
the task weight µ = 0.75, the number of iterations was epoch =
2000.
In order to verify the algorithm, the visual effects, histograms,
residual images, PSNR and other parts were analyzed in this
paper. Fig. 5 listed some of the carrier images and secret data
images in the test set used.
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al.
Fig. 5. Examples of partial test set images (upper row) and secret data images (lower row).
4.1. Visual effects
Fig. 6 shown the experimental image and the corresponding
pixel histogram, including the original carrier image, hidden im-
age, secret image and extracted image. According to the images in
Fig. 6, it could be seen that there was no major visual difference
between the carrier image and the hidden image, and there was
no visual difference between the secret data and the extracted
data.
Generally speaking, the histogram represented the distribu-
tion of pixel values in the image, and the degree of modification
of the image could be judged based on the histogram. According
to the histogram in Fig. 6, the pixel histograms between the
original image and the hidden image were not much different,
so the invisibility of the hidden scheme was good. At the same
time, according to the histograms between the secret image and
the extracted image, it could be seen that the difference be-
tween the secret image and the extracted image by the proposed
scheme was very small. Therefore, the proposed scheme had
better performance in the visual effects.
4.2. Security analysis
The residual image could directly show the visual difference
between the images, and it could also be seen whether the hidden
image contained relevant information of secret image. If the
residual image contained the information, then the scheme was
insecure. Fig. 7 shown the residual image between the original
image and the hidden image, the residual image enlarged by 20
times, and the secret image.
According to Fig. 7, the residual images between the original
carrier image and the hidden image shown the afterimage of the
carrier image, and there was no similarity with the secret image.
Therefore, it was difficult to obtain useful semantic information
from the residual image in this scheme, and avoided the leakage
of secret data due to residual images.
At the same time, combined with the histogram comparison
test in Fig. 6, the histogram of the hidden image had no corre-
lation with the histogram of the secret image. It is impossible to
judge whether the secret data was hidden in the image, and the
secret image could not be extracted according to the histogram.
Therefore, the secret hidden in the image had better security. It
could be seen that this scheme belonged to the coverless image
steganography scheme, and the security of the proposed scheme
was relatively high.
5
Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022
4.3. Hidden capacity analysis
The scheme proposed in this paper hided the grayscale image
into the color image, which had a certain improvement compared
with some traditional spatial domain scheme. Effective capacity
(EC) was used to indicate the embedding rate of secret data,
which could reflect the degree of data embedding. The calculation
method of the effective capacity was as follows:
NS
EC = (9)
NC
where NS was the size of the secret data (bits), and NC was the
number of extracted pixels of the carrier image. Table 1 shown
the EC comparison between the proposed scheme and similar
schemes. The schemes used for comparison include traditional
schemes and neural network schemes.
According to Table 1, the maximum capacity of the traditional
data hiding schemes was 2 bpp. Compared with the traditional
data hiding schemes [1,10,13], the proposed scheme had a larger
effective capacity. The maximum capacity of the data hiding
scheme using a neural network was 8 bpp, which meat that
each pixel hidden 8 bits of data. The proposed scheme achieved
the maximum ability of the schemes [18,24] that used neural
network to hide grayscale images into color images, so the hid-
den ability of the proposed scheme had reached the theoretical
maximum hidden ability.
4.4. Image quality
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) was an objective evaluation
index of image quality, which was widely used in fields, such
as data hiding. A higher PSNR value indicated that the image
distortion was small and the image quality after hiding was
better. It could also explain the difference between the extracted
secret image and the original secret data. The PSNR calculation
method was as follows:
(2n − 1)2
PSNR = 10 × log10 ( ) (10)
MSE(I , Ia )
Among them, I was the original carrier image or the original
secret data image, and Ia was the hidden image or the extracted
secret image.
The Structural Similarity (SSIM) index was a metric based on
the Human Visual System (HVS) to quantify the degradation of
structural information between two images. SSIM index could
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022

Fig. 6. Comparison of experimental image and histogram.

Table 1
Comparison of effective capacity between the proposed scheme and similar schemes.
Schemes Carrier image size(bits) Secret data size(bits) EC (bpp)
Gao et al. [1] 256×256 132,126 2
Traditional Meng et al. [10] 512×512 <256×256×8 <2
Pakdaman et al. [13] 512×512 <128×128×8 <1
Rehman et al. [18] 300×300(RGB) 300×300×8 8
Yang et al. [23] 256×256 256×256 <1
Neural network Zhang et al. [24] 256×256(RGB) 256×256×8 8
Zhou et al. [25] 256×256(RGB) 25×8 <1
Proposed 256×256(RGB) 256×256×8 8

be used as a quantitative measure of image quality, which was where σI2 and σI2a were the variances of I and Ia respectively, and
composed of luminance l, contrast c and structure s [35]. The σI and σIa were the covariances of I and Ia respectively. C2 was a
metric was defined as follows: stable denominator to avoid instability like C1 . And the structure
comparison s (I , Ia ) was calculated as follows:
SSIM (I , Ia ) = l (I , Ia ) × c (I , Ia ) × s(I , Ia ) (11) σIIa + C3
s (I , Ia ) = (14)
The luminance comparison l (I , Ia ) was calculated as follows: σI + σIa + C3
2µI µIa + C1 Similarly, C3 was a stable denominator to avoid instability. σIIa
l (I , Ia ) = (12) represented the correlation coefficient between I and Ia
µ2I + µ2Ia + C1
Table 2 shown the average PSNR and SSIM values of the model
where, µI and µIa were the average values of I and Ia , respec- on the test set, and compared with the latest neural network data
tively, and C1 was a stable denominator to avoid variables whose hiding schemes or the data hiding schemes with similar hidden
denominator was zero. And the contrast comparison c (I , Ia ) was capacity. The PSNR value reflected the degree of distortion, and
it could usually be concluded that the visual effect of the image
calculated as follows:
will be poor when the PSNR was lower than 30 dB. The value of
2σI σIa + C2 SSIM was between −1 and 1. If the SSIM value of the two images
c (I , Ia ) = (13)
σI2 + σI2a + C2 was 1, it meat that the two images were exactly the same.
6
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al. Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022

Fig. 7. The residual image between the original carrier image and the hidden image, and the secret data image.

Table 2
Comparison of PSNR and SSIM between the proposed scheme and similar schemes.
Schemes Hidden image Extracted image
PSNR(Average) 32.5 34.7571
Rehman et al. [18]
SSIM(Average) 0.9371 0.93
PSNR(Average) 42.3 38.45
Li et al. [19]
SSIM(Average) 0.987 0.953
PSNR(Max) 37.35 31.38
Chen et al. [20]
SSIM(Max) – –
PSNR(Max) 34.89 39.9
Zhang et al. [24]
SSIM(Max) 0.9681 0.96
PSNR(Average) 40.4716 40.6665
Duan et al. [32]
SSIM(Average) 0.9794 0.9842
PSNR(Average) 39.7708 43.3571
Proposed
SSIM(Average) 0.9828 0.9862

It could be seen from Table 2 that the PSNR values of the
proposed schemes were all greater than 30 dB, so the hidden
images and the extracted images have good visual effects. In the
comparison scheme, the PSNR and SSIM values of the hidden
image through this scheme were slightly lower than that the
scheme [19,32], but higher than the scheme [18,20,24], and the
PSNR and SSIM values of the extracted image were the highest.
Therefore, compared with similar papers, the quality of hidden
image by the proposed scheme was good, the pixel difference
between the hidden image and the original carrier image was
small, and the pixel difference between the extracted image and
the original secret image was also small. Therefore, the proposed
scheme had advantages over other schemes in the judgment
criteria of PSNR and SSIM values.
7
4.5. Robustness analysis
For common non-geometric attacks, including Cropping, Salt
and Pepper Noise, and Gaussian Filtering, experiments were per-
formed. Among them, cropping attacks used 1/4 and 1/2 range
crop, salt and pepper noise attacks used standard deviations of
0.001 and 0.005, and Gaussian filtering used template sizes of
3×3 and 7×7. The hidden image was attacked and then used to
extract the secret data. The example image and the average PSNR
and SSIM were obtained, and were shown in Table 3.
According to Table 3, it could be seen that the proposed
scheme could perform well against non-geometric attacks. When
the hidden image was cropped, noise added, filtered, etc., the
L. Liu, L. Meng, Y. Peng et al.
Table 3
Diagrams and data of attack experiments.
image extracted from the hidden image was still a recogniz-
able secret image. In these attack experiments, the noise at-
tack performed best, which was common in the image transmis-
sion process. Therefore, the proposed scheme had the ability to
deal with non-geometric attacks, and had certain robustness to
non-geometric attacks.
5. Conclusions
A data hiding scheme based on U-Net and wavelet trans-
form proposed in this paper. This scheme innovatively com-
bined wavelet transform with U-Net network, and realized data
hiding and extraction networks through two full convolutional
networks. The secret data hidden by the sender had no visual
difference from the original image in the eyes of the receiver,
but the secret data extracted through the extraction network was
clear. Experimental results shown that the proposed algorithm
had better visual effects, and the secret data would not be re-
flected in the carrier image. Therefore, the proposed scheme had
advantages compared with some current schemes. The follow-up
work will be further studied in terms of robustness.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Lianshan Liu: Methodology, Formal analysis, Resources, Writ-
ing - review & editing, Visualization, Data curation. Lingzhuang
Meng: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Writ-
ing - original draft. Yanjun Peng: Funding acquisition, Supervi-
sion. Xiaoli Wang: Investigation, Project administration.
8
Knowledge-Based Systems 223 (2021) 107022
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 61976126), Shandong Natural Science
Foundation, China (No. ZR2019MF003).
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