The very large‐scale integration (VLSI) design‐based architectures of 2‐D filters must have low power consumption and high speed rather than accuracy for image processing applications. The inexact computations reduce the delay, area, and power in arithmetic architectures, and utilizing this advantage an approximation can be introduced in 2‐D digital filters. In this work, circular symmetry is adopted to optimize the 2‐D finite impulse response (FIR) filter architecture, and it is implemented using imprecise multipliers and approximate compressors with acceptable accuracy. The exact 4:2 compressor is modified into an approximate 4:2 compressor by ignoring few inputs. Hence, hardware requirement and delay parameters are improved. The proposed compressor is designed by mixed logic rather than complete complementary metal‐oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic. The dual value logic (DVL), transmission gate logic (TGL), and CMOS mixed logic gates are used to decrease the number of transistors in the circuits. The proposed compressors are used in the approximate Dadda multiplier (ADM). The ADMs are utilized to implement the 2‐D FIR filter architecture. The designed filter is coded in Verilog and implemented using field programmable gate array (FPGA). The hardware utilization is analyzed and compared with exact 2‐D FIR filters. Next, the proposed architecture is synthesized using Cadence genus tools, and physical design is carried out by Cadence Innovus tools in 45‐nm CMOS technology. The final physical design layout‐area, power, and delay reports are correlated with existing state‐of‐artworks. It is found that the proposed 2‐D FIR filter outperforms the existing works.