A method for preventing artifacts in an electronic image decoded from a block-transform coded representation of an image, the method comprises the steps of: receiving blocks of the electronic image decoded from the transform-coded representation of the image; determining whether a portion of the decoded image contains low detail pixels; determining boundary pixels as pixels within a predetermined area of a predetermined number of low detail pixels; filtering the boundary pixels with one of a plurality of directionally-oriented smoothing filters for obtaining one or more boundary replacement pixel values; and reconstructing the image by replacing one or more pixels in the boundary with one or more of the boundary replacement pixel values.