Adaptive sampling for storage of progressive images on DNA

Traditional storage media cannot keep up with the rapidly growing demands in data storage. DNA molecules offer a dense, durable and low-energy alternative for storing data. Prior work on DNA storage has developed efficient coding and error control techniques to transform DNA into a reliable data storage medium. However, in order to be useful as general purpose archival medium, solutions must also be developed to support applications that need advanced access paths over data stored in DNA to enable search and selective retrieval. In this paper, we focus on one such application--adaptive resolution selection over image collections stored in DNA. We introduce a DNA-based image storage system that can adaptively lower the retrieval cost of the image by selecting and decoding only the oligos containing a resolution-reduced version of the image. Each resolution layer is encoded into a set of oligos using the JPEG 2000 progressive codec and the JPEG DNA VM codec, a DNA-based coder that aims at retrieving a file with a high reliability. The novelty of the image storage system lies in its adaptive resolution selection process, based on the random access capabilities provided by the Adaptive Sampling functionality of the Nanopore sequencer. Adaptive Sampling allows the sequencing process to select specific resolution layers oligos of the image, that can then be decoded. Additional resolution layers can even be dynamically selected to refine the decoded image.