R&D: DNA-QLC, Efficient and Reliable Image Encoding Scheme for DNA Storage

BMC Genomics has published an article written by Yanfen Zheng, Ben Cao, Xiaokang Zhang, Shuang Cui, School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Lingshui Street, DalianLiaoning, 116024, China, Bin Wang, The Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Intelligent Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Software Engineering, Dalian University, Xuefu Street, DalianLiaoning, 116622, China, and Qiang Zhang, School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Lingshui Street, DalianLiaoning, 116024, China.

Background
“DNA storage has the advantages of large capacity, long-term stability, and low power consumption relative to other storage mediums, making it a promising new storage medium for multimedia information such as images. However, DNA storage has a low coding density and weak error correction ability.“

Results
“To achieve more efficient DNA storage image reconstruction, we propose DNA-QLC (QRes-VAE and Levenshtein code (LC)), which uses the quantized ResNet VAE (QRes-VAE) model and LC for image compression and DNA sequence error correction, thus improving both the coding density and error correction ability. Experimental results show that the DNA-QLC encoding method can not only obtain DNA sequences that meet the combinatorial constraints, but also have a net information density that is 2.4 times higher than DNA Fountain. Furthermore, at a higher error rate (2%), DNA-QLC achieved image reconstruction with an SSIM value of 0.917.“

Conclusions
“The results indicate that the DNA-QLC encoding scheme guarantees the efficiency and reliability of the DNA storage system and improves the application potential of DNA storage for multimedia information such as images.“