# A simple blind-denoising filter inspired by electrically coupled photoreceptors in the retina

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Retina gap junctions support the robust perception by warping neural representational geometries along the visual hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14200/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photoreceptors in the retina are coupled by electrical synapses called "gap junctions". It has long been established that gap junctions increase the signal-to-noise ratio of photoreceptors. Inspired by electrically coupled photoreceptors, we introduced a simple filter, the PR-filter, with only one variable. On BSD68 dataset, PR-filter showed outstanding performance in SSIM during blind denoising tasks. It also significantly improved the performance of state-of-the-art convolutional neural network blind denosing on non-Gaussian noise. The performance of keeping more details might be attributed to small receptive field of the photoreceptors.