HVS models and rods and cones
As far as i know the YUV color space was not inspired from HVS, but from technical compatibility reasons; to transmit new color video television broadcast signals over the existing black and white infrastructure. 

Essentially, the Y component of a color image (which is captured naturally in RGB system) carries the black and white or the brightness information of the image and is transmitted in such a way that old TV equipments (those that do not have color receiving capabilities) can still receive and decode the Y component as if it were the old black and white signal and still be able to display it without any hardware modification.

While at the same time, new (back then in 50s, 60s) color TVs were capable of also receiving transmitted U and V components and were able to display color pictures by properly decoding the YUV signal using some sort of comb filtering in NTSC and PAL systems.

Furthermore, Y carries more bandwidth and information than U and V. There's a separate color carrier towards the end of the channel bandwidth (before the audio carrier).

Because of certain industrial standardization concerns, YUV and its variants (YPbPr, YCbCr) achieved wide range of acceptance and being used in almost every image and video electronic equipments and codecs (in its digital form).

It's true that Human sensititivity to color and brightness are different due to cone and rod structures. And researchers can take advantage of this information to optimize their metrics with respect to human visual system. The paper most probably assumes such a correlation.