[afhof]

Its doubtful that the image can be recovered. The information really is gone. I suspect it would be easier to make it simple to have redundant copies of the data, rather than trying to fix the images after they're gone.

[nitrogen]

If it's only a single bit that's toggled, you can just iterate through all the bits until you find one that fixes the image after you flip it.

[JosephRedfern]

For a 1MB JPEG, that'd be over 8 million different images.

[nitrogen]

If you could point to a region of the image where the corruption begins, you would reduce the number of possible images significantly.

[porges]

That sounds plausible. Another idea: choose a section of "bad image" and a section of "good image" which should have similar colours and then generate mutations of the corrupted DCT square until you have a close match between the two areas.

[aninhumer]

Given that we're assuming some kind of correctness metric for the final image, could we not also use this metric to locate the start of the corruption?

[WatchDog]

For a single byte error that is visibly obvious, you could just iterate through 255 combinations until the user thinks the image looks right.

[tehwebguy]

Yeah maybe you could have the user iterate through a search tree the way an optometrist performs an eye exam, "Which is better, one flip or two?"

But I don't know if there is a way to create a tree of the possibilities.