A JPEG-based image coding solution for data storage on DNA

The efficient storage of digital data is becoming very challenging over the years due to the exponential increase in the generation of data which can't compete with the existing storage resources. Furthermore, the infrequently accessed data can be safely stored for no longer than 10–20 years due to the short life-span of conventional storage devices. To this end, recent studies have proven DNA to be a very promising candidate for the long-term storage of digital data. Several pioneering works have proposed different encoding methods for the specific encoding of images into a quaternary DNA representation while first compressing the image using the classical JPEG standard to reduce the high cost of DNA synthesis. However this type of compression is not optimized with respect to the quaternary DNA code and results in an open-loop workflow. In our previous works we have introduced the first closed-loop solution for generating a constrained fixed-length quaternary code which allows controlling the synthesis cost thanks to a source allocation algorithm. In this paper, we extend our studies to proposing a variable-length encoding solution which is based on the JPEG standard.