A novelty filter detects what is new in a scene and may be likened to a temporal high-pass filter. The current status of optical novelty filters and related devices, based upon four-wave mixing and two-beam coupling in photorefractive media, is reviewed. A detector that shows only what is not new, a monotony filter, may be likened to a temporal low-pass filter. Demonstrations of high- and low-pass and bandpass temporal image filters are then discussed. An analytical treatment of the two-beam coupling devices is given in a Laplace transform framework in the undepleted pump approximation assuming plane wave inputs. This allows a unified treatment of the various filter characteristics.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>