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For anyone that has ever accidentally deleted irreplaceable family vacation photos off a digital camera, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU is creating new computer software that can help you.
Professor Nasir Memon has recently developed a computer program that can reconstruct deleted digital photographs. The program does this by reading unused space from any media (e.g. flash cards, USB sticks and hard drives) and looking for hidden pieces of the image there.
'It then reassembles these pieces very much like a jigsaw puzzle,' Memon said.
By using statistical modeling and analysis techniques, the software figures out which pieces are most likely to fit together and then uses a sequence of instructions to compute the reconstruction that most resembles the original photograph.
The research for program development began in 2003 and was primarily conducted at Polytechnic's Information Systems and Internet Security Lab. It wasn't until 2006 that Memon received funds from the National Science Foundation and New York state to commercialize the technology.
Just this week, copies of the program have been released for sale to the public. Memon said users who stores files on digital media are potential buyers, should they accidentally deletes files and want to recover them.
'Our first release targets consumers, and no skills are needed,' he said.
CAS junior Sebastiano Varoli said the program was something he would definitely purchase after a recent mishap when he mistakenly deleted a photograph he had planned to use for a project in a photography course; he had planned to pitch the photograph to a friend who owns a gallery and try to sell it.
'That's a lot of money I could have potentially had,' Varoli said.
Tisch sophomore Alex Emanuel had a similar experience on Halloween when photographs of him and his girlfriend were erased from his camera.
'We were in matching costumes and everything, and they were just all gone,' he said. 'It's a real pain when you lose your pictures.'
Beyond ordinary consumers, other releases of the program will target many different communities, such as forensic organizations, law enforcement and intelligence groups. Deleted digital photos can provide critical information in investigations.
The new program does have limitations. Memon said large drives take a lot of time to process and that many of the lesser-known formats - namely, those that are not JPEG, PNG or RAW files - are not supported.
However, it is the first technology in existence that can reconstruct fragmented files without file table information.
Copies of the software are for sale at Digital-Assembly.com.
Alex Crees is a contributing writer. E-mail her at university@nyunews.com.
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