I am still constantly studying JPEG corruption in able to be repair cases as possible. We can fix cases like this in most occasions.
Half lower half of the below JPEG is hardly visible. Using my JPEG Repair Toolkit I am able to repair this type of corruption, and it is as good as new. The JPEG online Repair Shop can be found here.
Although I use tools I develop to aid me in the JPG repair, it requires the human eye, and manual manipulation of the image bit stream to fix the corruption.
What can be repaired?
We can repair JPGs as long as the majority of the actual image stream is present.
We can fix corrupt JPEGs:
- With corrupt headers. Typically these will not load at all. JPEGs consist of meta structures (the headers) and the actual image data. To repair headers we need a intact sample JPG that was shot with the same device (camera of phone), using the same settings.
- With bit errors. These are errors in the actual image data. Usually at some point in the image, colors and pixels ‘shift’ (see above example).
- By combining incorrectly recovered JPGs. Due to fragmentation Photo Recovery software may not be able to piece fragments of files together. We can do this manually. You can not perform this kind of JPEG repair using conventional image editors.