The secret-sharing mechanism has been widely applied to the e-commerce, communications and multimedia fields. With sufficient shares, the involved participants can cooperate to reveal secret data. Fraudulent participants, however, may provide a fake shadow in order to fool others. Consequently, cheating prevention has become a critical essential for secret sharing systems. In this article, the authors propose an efficient image secret sharing scheme that can resist cheating attacks. The simulator shows that the novel scheme is sensitive to cheating detection and cheater identification. In particular, the new method allows an authorised participant to reveal a lossless secret image and to further restore the valued host image without distortion. The reversibility of the secret sharing system provides practicability and widespread potential for preserving medical images, military images and artistic images.
