Image storage in DNA using Vector Quantization

Rapid technological advances and the increasing use of social media has caused a tremendous increase in the generation of digital data, a fact that imposes nowadays a great challenge for the field of digital data storage due to the shortterm reliability of conventional storage devices. Hard disks, flash, tape or even optical storage have a durability of 5 to 20 years while running data centers also require huge amounts of energy. An alternative to hard drives is the use of DNA, which is life's information-storage material, as a means of digital data storage. Recent works have proven that storing digital data into DNA is not only feasible but also very promising as the DNA's biological properties allow the storage of a great amount of information into an extraordinary small volume for centuries or even longer with no loss of information. In this work we present an extended end-to-end storage workflow specifically designed for the efficient storage of images onto synthetic DNA. This workflow uses a new encoding algorithm which serves the needs of image compression while also being robust to the biological errors which may corrupt the encoding.