Does the eye-tremor provide the hyperacuity phenomenon?

International audienceThis paper is devoted to a study of the role of the fluctuations the eye is subjected to, from the point of view of noise-enhanced processing. To this end, a basic model of the retina is considered, namely a regular sampler subjected to space and time fluctuations that model the random sampling and the eye-tremor respectively. The filtering that can be done by the photoreceptor is also taken into account and the study focuses on a stochastic model of a natural scene. To quantify the effect of the noise, a correlation coefficient between the signal acquired by a given photoreceptor and a given point of the scene the eye is looking at is considered. It is shown both on academic examples and a more realistic case that the fluctuations which affect the retina can induce noise-enhanced processing effects. The observed effect is then interpreted as a stochastic control of the retina via the microsaccades