Repair broken jpg files

Question

Hi I'm sure there were a lot of similar questions asked, but after searching a lot I didn't find any post describing my situation.

I have some jpg files which have some colours wrong after a certain point and also every pixel is shifted to the left. I think this is because of some missing bytes at the point where it changes. I tried to edit the file with vi but it seems impossible to find out where the missing bytes are, also vi is very complicated to use. I also tried nano but it's not binary-safe.

This is one of the images in question:

So I want to ask you two questions:

1. How can I repair such images in Linux?
2. How could I safely open and edit the file in a binary text editor under Linux?

Edit: using hexedit I discovered that from position 0x27F000 to 0x27F403 there are only ones 0xff, and from 0x27F404 to 0x27FFFF there are only zeroes 0x00. This makes something like this:

    0027EFF0   F8 83 C3 E2  09 35 AF 13  44 6E C5 FD  C7 EF 23 E8  .....5..Dn....#.
    0027F000   FF FF FF FF  FF FF FF FF  FF FF FF FF  FF FF FF FF  ................
    [...]
    0027F400   FF FF FF FF  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  ................
    [...]
    0027FFF0   00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00  ................
    00280000   8F 39 6E 47  4F 43 5F 36  7C 73 66 F1  0D AE AD AF  .9nGOC_6|sf.....

Changing these bytes with random numbers I was able to unshift the image, but there is still the colour problem.

Could someone point me to some documentation about jpeg encoding so I can figure out how to know where an 8x8 block ends.

I'm wondering why the positions are so precise (0x27F000 to 0x27FFFF), could this be a bug of my cam or the memory card I used?

Answer 1

Unfortunately I am not aware of any Linux tools. This works in Windows: youtu.be/A33zn_sgm30

It can be a little finnicky to get it right, but do-able. Disclosure: I am author of this software, which I originally wrote for own use, which can be found at www.disktuna.com.

There's a free alternative too but it will not be able to handle too severe corruption at www.anderspedersen.net.

Answer 2

The wikipedia article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Entropy_coding has a lot of information - the most relevant to your current problem is this one:

The previous quantized DC coefficient is used to predict the current quantized DC coefficient. The difference between the two is encoded rather than the actual value. The encoding of the 63 quantized AC coefficients does not use such prediction differencing.

The color shifting in the remainder of the image is caused by a single bad DC coefficient that cascades to all the rest. You might be able to find a small area (maybe one byte, maybe two - it's probably actually some sequence of bits) that reliably affects the colors, and try a large number of different values for that.

It may be easier to simply fix the image in a graphic editor - it looks like the one you posted, other than the shift (and wraparound), may simply have a lower brightness, you could select the area and use the Levels tool. Others that have more involved color shifts, you might be able to get a good enough result by looking at the decomposition in color channels (JPGs may be in RGB or Y'CbCr) and fixing each channel separately, possibly swapping channels.

EDIT: Oops, I didn't see how old your question was. Well, maybe this will be useful to you or someone else.

Answer 3

2) How could I safely open and edit the file in a binary text editor under Linux?

Lots of great binary editors can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/839227/how-to-edit-binary-file-on-the-unix-systems

My personal favorites are vim with :%!xxd hack and hexedit

Answer 4

Have you tried photorec? You can install it on Ubuntu like this:

sudo apt-get install testdisk

Check the manual with:

man photorec

and just run photorec from the terminal like so:

photorec

It will ask you to select the source and a destination and try to recover jpg files automatically.

To prevent damaging the original, I recommend making a copy with the dd command. Good luck!

Answer 5

I just used Photorec to recover pictures from a SD card that went corrupt. Although it did not recover all files, it did a great job recovering a good number of them. With that said, MP4 videos were recovered but could not be opened. Some JPEG files were recovered but they also couldn't be viewed or were really messed up, as the sample provided at the beginning of this thread. Photorec did not fix them.

Bottom line: Photorec is designed to retrieve lost files from a corrupt FILE SYSTEMS but apparently doesn't do anything to recover the content of corrupted FILES.