DY-LUT: Depth-Aware YCbCr Lookup Tables for Real-Time Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement is challenged by spatially non-uniform, wavelength-dependent attenuation. Propagation distance and wavelength govern this degradation, while YCbCr separates luminance from chrominance for restoration. We propose DY-LUT, a depth-aware YCbCr lookup-table framework for real-time enhancement. A dual-branch encoder predicts image-level fusion weights and a joint pair of pixel-wise degradation indices from image and depth features. These quantities condition learnable 4D LUTs, followed by lightweight local refinement. DY-LUT preserves traditional LUT efficiency while enabling depth-conditioned, spatially adaptive restoration. With externally supplied depth, its 3.56M-parameter enhancement network achieves competitive quality on UIEB-90 and LSUI and runs 9--304× faster than representative high-capacity baselines. Adaptive inference further maintains real-time performance (~7 ms) for 4K UIQAD images. DY-LUT also benefits downstream detection and feature matching. Ablations show that YCbCr is a more effective basis than RGB for depth-conditioned lookup, while the jointly learned indices further improve adaptive querying. These results provide a physically grounded route to efficient UIE on practical platforms.