Photo recovery is the process of salvaging digital photographs from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally.
Logical Damage or the inability to view photos can occur for several reasons.
Simson Garfinkel showed that on average, 16% of JPEGs are fragmented,[1] which means on average 16% of JPEGs are recovered partially or appear corrupt when recovered using techniques that cannot handle fragmented photos.
[citation needed] In validated carving, a decoder is used to detect any errors in recovery of a photo.
Validated carving is superb at detecting photos that are either fragmented or have parts that are over-written or missing.
A fragmented photo recovery technique where a header and footer are identified and then all combinations of blocks between the header and footer are validated to determine which combination results in the correct recovery of the photo.