Systems and methods for adaptively filtering DCT coefficients in a video encoder

The invention is related to methods and apparatus that provide selective filtering of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. Advantageously, filtering of the DCT coefficients is efficiently performed in the frequency domain, rather than the processing intensive pixel domain (time domain). The DCT filtering is performed "in-loop" to the DCT encoding and not in a preprocessing approach that is independent to encoding loop. The DCT filtering advantageously reduces the number of bits used to encode a picture, which can preserve compliance with occupancy levels for buffer models while improving picture quality over a conventional technique to preserve bits, such as an increase in the value of the quantization parameter QP.