In this paper, we propose an adaptive blocking artifact reduction algorithm using characteristics of the block boundaries. Blocking artifacts contain the high frequency components near the block boundaries, so the lowpass filtering can remove them. But a simple lowpass filtering results into blurring by remove important features such as edges. To overcome this problem, we determine the modes depending on the characteristics around boundaries then proper filter is applied to each area. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves deblocking performance compared to that of MPEG-4.