On the reduction of the cost for encoding/decoding digital images stored on synthetic DNA

Living in the age of data explosion, the research of solutions for efficient long term storage of the infrequently used "cold" data is becoming of great interest. Recent studies have proven that due to its biological properties, the DNA is a strong candidate for the storage of digital information allowing also data longevity. However the biological procedures of DNA synthesis and sequencing are expensive while also introducing important restrictions in the encoding process. In this work we present a new constrained encoding method for the robust encoding /decoding of images to be stored into DNA. Furthermore we study the possibility of fully retrieving the stored information using less sequencing samples and consequently reducing the sequencing cost.