A system and method that adjusts the strength of a de-blocking filter to remove block artifacts in compressed video is disclosed. Block artifacts are associated with the block-based image/video compression techniques. The block artifacts deteriorate the quality of compressed image and video, especially at low bit rates. A de-blocking method estimates the strength of the block artifacts at each block boundary either directly from the MPEG decoder or from a measurement process or both, and adjusts the de-blocking parameters accordingly. An additional block content analysis improves the performance of the overall de-blocking process.