An apparatus, a computer readable medium to instruct a process to implement a method, and a method of reducing blocking artifacts and/or noise in an image that has been compressed by a block-based encoding process. The method includes deblocking the image using overlapped forward directional transforms, the overlapped forward directional transforms including directional selecting to filter across horizontal and vertical boundaries, denoising the image, in one version edge detecting to classify individual pixels as to whether or not they belong to edge features, and generating output pixels by locally adapting to whether the pixels are in block boundaries, and/or include edge features.