Novelties - Sleuthing Software Can Reassemble Deleted Photos Via NYTimes.com :

Now, new software is smart enough to find and reassemble fragmented digital photographs, even when the directions for locating them have been deleted. The feat is similar to assembling a million pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no guiding box-top image.

One day, this software may be useful not only in its consumer applications, restoring snapshots that have accidentally been erased, but also in recovering deliberately deleted images that might provide evidence in cases of corporate spying or child pornography.

The program was devised by the computer scientist Nasir Memon, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. It is an example of a sophisticated technique called file carving — restoring the contents of a file after the identifying information that accompanies it has been removed or lost — said Golden G. Richard III, a professor of computer science at the University of New Orleans, who has also written a file-carving application.

Automated programs like Dr. Memon’s are highly unusual, Dr. Richard said.

“Most applications simply don’t handle images that have been torn into pieces and scrambled that well,” he said. “His technique takes those shreds and puts them back together.”

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