Methods and systems to detect and blend a surround area to avoid filtering artifact due to the area in image filtering are disclosed. The described methods include a compensation step and can be applied to arbitrary images with padded areas of arbitrary shape, such as letterboxes, pillar-boxes, ovals, or other shapes, including logos and close captions. Such methods detect the surround areas in the image with possible compression artifact and noise, and then perform blending to minimize the effects of the surround areas for any arbitrary image filtering operations.