Revisiting Lightweight Low-Light Image Enhancement: From a YUV Color Space Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yan, Hailong, Liu, Shice, Zhang, Xiangtao, Yao, Lujian, Yang, Fengxiang, Chen, Jinwei, Li, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yan, Hailong
Liu, Shice
Zhang, Xiangtao
Yao, Lujian
Yang, Fengxiang
Chen, Jinwei
Li, Bo
author_facet Yan, Hailong
Liu, Shice
Zhang, Xiangtao
Yao, Lujian
Yang, Fengxiang
Chen, Jinwei
Li, Bo
contents In the current era of mobile internet, Lightweight Low-Light Image Enhancement (L3IE) is critical for mobile devices, which faces a persistent trade-off between visual quality and model compactness. While recent methods employ disentangling strategies to simplify lightweight architectural design, such as Retinex theory and YUV color space transformations, their performance is fundamentally limited by overlooking channel-specific degradation patterns and cross-channel interactions. To address this gap, we perform a frequency-domain analysis that confirms the superiority of the YUV color space for L3IE. We identify a key insight: the Y channel primarily loses low-frequency content, while the UV channels are corrupted by high-frequency noise. Leveraging this finding, we propose a novel YUV-based paradigm that strategically restores channels using a Dual-Stream Global-Local Attention module for the Y channel, a Y-guided Local-Aware Frequency Attention module for the UV channels, and a Guided Interaction module for final feature fusion. Extensive experiments validate that our model establishes a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks, delivering superior visual quality with a significantly lower parameter count.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Lightweight Low-Light Image Enhancement: From a YUV Color Space Perspective
Yan, Hailong
Liu, Shice
Zhang, Xiangtao
Yao, Lujian
Yang, Fengxiang
Chen, Jinwei
Li, Bo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In the current era of mobile internet, Lightweight Low-Light Image Enhancement (L3IE) is critical for mobile devices, which faces a persistent trade-off between visual quality and model compactness. While recent methods employ disentangling strategies to simplify lightweight architectural design, such as Retinex theory and YUV color space transformations, their performance is fundamentally limited by overlooking channel-specific degradation patterns and cross-channel interactions. To address this gap, we perform a frequency-domain analysis that confirms the superiority of the YUV color space for L3IE. We identify a key insight: the Y channel primarily loses low-frequency content, while the UV channels are corrupted by high-frequency noise. Leveraging this finding, we propose a novel YUV-based paradigm that strategically restores channels using a Dual-Stream Global-Local Attention module for the Y channel, a Y-guided Local-Aware Frequency Attention module for the UV channels, and a Guided Interaction module for final feature fusion. Extensive experiments validate that our model establishes a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks, delivering superior visual quality with a significantly lower parameter count.
title Revisiting Lightweight Low-Light Image Enhancement: From a YUV Color Space Perspective
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17349