Storing images and point clouds on DNA support with fountain codes with fountain codes

The use of DNA molecules as a storage medium has been recently proposed as a solution to the exponentially increasing demand for data storage, achieving lower energy consumption while offering better lifespan and higher information density. The nucleotides composing the molecules can be regarded as quaternary symbols, but constraints are generally imposed to avoid sequences prone to errors during synthesis, archival, and sequencing. While the majority of previous works in the field have proposed methods for translating general binary data into nucleotides, others have presented algorithms tailored for specific data types such as images as well as joining source and channel coding into a single process. This paper proposes and evaluates a method that integrates DNA Fountain codes with state-of-the-art compression techniques, targeting the storage of images and threedimensional point clouds. Results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous techniques for coding images directly into DNA, putting forward a first benchmark for the coding of point clouds.