A method for removing blocking artifacts from moving and still pictures, comprising classifying horizontal and vertical boundaries in each picture as blocky or non-blocky; for each blocky boundary, defining an adaptive, picture content-dependent, one-dimensional filtered pixels region of interest (ROI) that crosses the boundary and is bound at each of its ends by a bounding pixel; defining a finite filter having a length correlated with the length of the ROI; defining a filtering pixels expansion that uniquely determines the padding values of the finite length filtered pixels ROI for the finite length filtering; and filtering the ROI pixels using the finite filter and the filtering expansion.