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

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.