Accurate object detection under low-light conditions is a critical requirement for reliable perception in autonomous driving systems. However, night-time environments often suffer from poor illumination, noise, and reduced feature visibility, which significantly degrade the performance of conventional object detection models. To address this challenge, this paper proposes spatial contrast learning (SCL)-you only look once version 11 (YOLOv11), an enhanced object detection framework designed for night-time scenarios. The proposed approach integrates SCL to improve feature discrimination in dark regions and employs the revolution optimization algorithm (ROA) for effective model parameter optimization. The framework is evaluated on three benchmark night-time datasets, ExDark, LLVIP, and BDD100K, to assess its detection performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a mAP@50 of 72.9%, improving the baseline YOLOv11 by 9.5% while also reducing inference latency by 18.3%. Comparative evaluations with existing detectors further confirm that the proposed method provides improved accuracy and efficiency for night-time object detection. These results indicate that the proposed framework can enhance perception reliability for autonomous driving applications operating in low-light environments.
