The role of the dealer in visual cryptography In visual cryptography schemes (VCS), there is special person called dealer. The dealer sets up the system, and the only one who knows about secret image. After encryption, the dealer distributes the shares to participants.

My question is, the dealer is one of $n$ participants or it should be from outside?
The dealer is one of n participants or it should be from outside?


The dealer, knows the secret as he's the one who shared it. Thereby it makes no sense to give him a share as well, unless you have a such a scheme that requires all partys to collaborate to recover the image, but then the question becomes: "Why bother secret sharing at all if the dealer could just store it if consensus with him is required?"

TL;DR: He can be part of the participants, but there's no benefit of him being one.