  Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to monitor oil spills are some methods
that have been proposed for the West African sub-region. With the increase in
the number of oil exploration companies in Ghana (and her neighbors) and the
rise in the coastal activities in the sub-region, there is the need for proper
monitoring of the environmental impact of these socio-economic activities on
the environment. Detection and near real-time information about oil spills are
fundamental in reducing oil spill environmental impact. SAR images are prone to
some noise, which is predominantly speckle noise around the coastal areas. This
paper evaluates the performance of the mean and median filters used in the
preprocessing filtering to reduce speckle noise in SAR images for most image
processing algorithms.
