IMG-DNA: Approximate DNA storage for images

Abstract

Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) as a storage medium with high density and long-term preservation properties can satisfy the requirement of archival storage for rapidly increased digital volume. The read and write processes of DNA storage are error-prone. Images widely used in social media have the properties of fault tolerance which are well fitted to the DNA storage. However, prior work simply investigated the feasibility of DNA storage storing different types of data and simply store images in DNA storage, which did not fully investigate the fault-tolerant potential of images in the DNA storage. In this paper, we proposed a new image-based DNA system called IMG-DNA, which can efficiently store images in DNA storage with improved DNA storage robustness. First, a new DNA architecture is proposed to fit JPEG-based images and improve the image's robustness in DNA storage. Moreover, barriers inserted in DNA sequences efficiently prevent error propagation in images of DNA storage. The experimental results indicate that the proposed IMG-DNA achieves much higher fault-tolerant than prior work.