A new edge preserving wavelet filtering is proposed and it is applied to real SAR images that are generally affected by a multiplicative noise, called speckle, which degrades the quality of these images. The new approach attempts to look for the neighborhood area in the detail images of a wavelet decomposition, that identifies homogeneous areas and edge information by using masks in order to reduce speckle while edges are preserved The improved filtering method uses the Nagao and Matsuyama and Tomita and Tsuji masks to detect edge locations in wavelet subspaces. The information provided by the masks is used to distinguish which of the detail coefficients, are to be shrunk