Patent ID: 7894534

Claim:
A method of line-based, one dimensional, spatial filtering of reconstructed samples to minimise coding artifacts introduced at a block boundary in a block-based video encoder and/or decoder, the method having the steps of: (a) calculating, by the video decoder, a pair of indices used to access a table of a pair of corresponding activity threshold values, the indices calculated using an average quantization parameter and an offset parameter; (b) determining, by the video decoder, the activity threshold values based on the pair of indicies; (c) confirming, by the video decoder, whether the filtering process will modify the sample values on every line of samples for the block boundary by checking a content activity for the every line of samples for said block boundary, the content activity based on the determined activity threshold values; and (d) filtering, by the video decoder, the confirmed samples when a filtering strength, Bs, is not equal to zero, wherein Bs is calculated by: determining that at least one neighboring block across the block boundary is not intra-coded, wherein the at least one neighboring block is not intra-coded when the at least one neighboring block contains at least one non-zero coefficient; and determining that Bs is not equal to zero when the at least one neighboring block contains the at least one non-zero coefficient.