Cryptography is deemed to be the optimum strategy to secure the data privacy in which the data is encoded ahead of time before sharing it. Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) is an encryption method in which the secret message is split into at least two trivial images called ‘shares’ to cover it. However

such message are always targeted by hackers or dishonest members who attempt to decrypt the message. This can be avoided by not uncovering the secret message without the universal share when it is presented and is typically taken care of

by the trusted party. Hence

in this paper

an optimal and secure double-layered secret image sharing scheme is proposed. The proposed share creation process contains two layers such as threshold-based secret sharing in the first layer and universal share based secret sharing in the second layer. In first layer

Genetic Algorithm (GA)is applied to find the optimal threshold value based on the randomness of the created shares. Then

in the second layer

a novel design of universal share-based secret share creation method is proposed. Finally

Opposition Whale Optimization Algorithm (OWOA)-based optimal key was generated for rectange block cipher to secure each share. This helped in producing high quality reconstruction images. The researcher achieved average experimental outcomes in terms of PSNR and MSE values equal to 55.154225 and 0.79365625 respectively. The average PSNRwas less (49.134475) and average MSE was high (1) in case of existing methods.