HVIFormer: A Dual-Stage Low-Light Image Enhancement Method Based on HVI Representation

Low-light image enhancement improves the quality of video surveillance and image analysis and, as a result, has long been a hot topic in image processing. However, current research on this topic faces a difficult challenge—effectively suppressing noise while improving brightness and maintaining color consistency, especially in extremely dark scenes, where dark noise amplification, uneven exposure, and color shifts often interact, leading to detail loss and color distortion. To address the issue, we propose a dual-stage low-light enhancement framework based on the HVI (Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity) color space. The low-light image is first mapped to the HVI space, obtaining the intensity component I and the HVI-based feature map, with I being explicitly extracted as an intensity prior. A Transformer-based pre-recovery module is introduced for global dependency modeling, guided by the intensity prior I through an Intensity-Conditioned Block (ICB) for conditional feature interaction. Subsequently, a dual-branch enhancement network utilizes lightweight Complementary Cross-Attention (CCA) blocks for brightness refinement and color denoising. Finally, the enhanced image is remapped to the sRGB color space. The proposed framework decouples global brightness recovery and feature preprocessing from detail enhancement and color refinement, improving stability in extremely dark and high-noise scenarios. Through 18 quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance in dark noise suppression and color restoration across multiple low-light datasets.