Abstract: The block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (BDCT) is used in most image and video coding standards. However, in cases of high compression ratios, such as in low-bit-rate applications, BDCT results in the "blocking effect". In this paper we propose a simple and effective deblocking method using an adaptive filtering. The obtained results show that the proposed method effectively reduces the blocking effect without significant degrading other characteristics of the compressed image quality.