The objective of this review paper is to summarize the main properties of the spatial ARMA models and describe some of the well-known methods used in image filtering based on estimation of spatial autoregressive models. A new proposal based on robust RA estimation is also presented. Previous studies have shown that under additive outliers the RA estimator is resistant to a small percentage of contamination and behaves better than the LS, M, and GM estimators. A discussion about how well these models fit to a digital image is presented. Some applications using real images are presented to illustrate how an image is filtered in practice.