luminancebased

Luminancebased is an adjective used to describe methods, systems, or metrics that rely primarily on luminance—the perceived brightness of a scene—rather than color information. It is commonly used in fields such as image processing, computer vision, display technology, and color science.

In color science, luminance is a photometric quantity derived from the scene's radiance, intended to correlate with human visual sensitivity. Unlike brightness, which is subjective, luminance is defined by a standard conversion from color channels. Common formulations use weighted sums of RGB channels to estimate perceptual brightness.

Luminancebased techniques often operate on the luminance channel (Y or Y') to detect edges, segment regions, perform tone mapping in high dynamic range imaging, or compress data. Because human vision is more sensitive to luminance detail, processing that preserves or enhances Y can improve perceived image quality.

In video and image encoding, luminance information is treated separately from chrominance (CbCr or Uv). This separation allows for more efficient compression and for luminance-based processing to be applied without altering color, though overreliance on luminance alone can degrade color fidelity.

While useful, luminancebased approaches are often combined with chrominance information to maintain accurate color rendering and shading. The term serves as a general descriptor across disciplines and is not tied to a single standard or algorithm.