Reassembling the Fragmented JPEG Images Based on Sequential Pixel Prediction

File carving is a digital forensic technique which data files are extracted from unstructured data sources without the information of the previously stored file system. Since JPEG is one of the most popular image formats in the storage and distribution of digital photographic imagery, JPEG carving aroused numerous researchers' great interest. In this paper, a new algorithm of reassembling the fragmented JPEG file is described. To reassemble the fragmented JPEG file, a sequential pixel prediction model based on the neural network was proposed to determine whether or not the given fragment is adjacent to the last fragment in the original. The performance results obtained from the fragmented test-sets of DFRWS 2006 show that the method can be effectively used in recovery of fragmented JPEG files.