A quaternary code mapping resistant to the sequencing noise for DNA image coding

The exponential growth in the generation of digital information creates a big challenge for data storage given the capacity limitations of conventional storage devices. Recent works have proposed DNA as a means of digital data storage proposing a novel solution for long-term storage. Although having many advantages, DNA storage is a challenging topic due to the error-prone process of DNA sequencing (reading). To deal with this error most existing works focus on the introduction of error-correction methods. However, most of those methods introduce important redundancy without promising full error correction for the widely used sequencing method using the Nanopore sequencer. This work focuses on noise resistance rather than error-correction proposing a new algorithm for optimally assigning VQ indices to DNA codewords while reducing the visual impact of substitution errors that are caused during sequencing.