In this paper, we present an error concealment method to recover damaged blocks for block-based image coding schemes. Imperfect transmission of image data results in damaged blocks in the reconstructed images. Hence recovering damaged image blocks is needed for reliable image communications. To recover damaged blocks is to estimate damaged blocks from the correctly received or undamaged neighborhood information with a priori knowledge about natural images. The recovery problem considered in our method is to estimate a larger block, which consists of a damaged block and the undamaged neighborhood, from the undamaged neighborhood. To find an accurate estimate, a set of the feature vectors is introduced and an estimate is expressed as a linear combination of the feature vectors. The proposed method recoveres damaged blocks by projecting the undamaged neighborhood information onto the feature vectors. The sequential projections onto the feature vectors algorithm is proposed to find the projection coefficients of the feature vectors to minimize the squared difference of an estimate and the undamaged neighborhood information. We tested our algorithm through computer simulations. The experimental results showed the proposed method ourperforms the frequency domain prediction method in the PSNR values by 4.0-5.0dB. Tthe reconstructed images by the proposed method provide a good subjective quality as well as an objective one.