A biologically inspired separable learning vision model for real-time traffic object perception in Dark

Fast and accurate object perception in low-light traffic scenes has attracted increasing attention. However, due to severe illumination degradation and the lack of reliable visual cues, existing perception models and methods struggle to quickly adapt to and accurately predict in low-light environments. Moreover, there is the absence of available large-scale benchmark specifically focused on low-light traffic scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physically grounded illumination degradation method tailored to real-world low-light settings and construct Dark-traffic, the largest densely annotated dataset to date for low-light traffic scenes, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, and optical flow estimation. We further propose the Separable Learning Vision Model (SLVM), a biologically inspired framework designed to enhance perception under adverse lighting. SLVM integrates four key components: a light-adaptive pupillary mechanism for illumination-sensitive feature extraction, a feature-level separable learning strategy for efficient representation, task-specific decoupled branches for multi-task separable learning, and a spatial misalignment-aware fusion module for precise multi-feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLVM achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational overhead. Notably, it outperforms RT-DETR by 11.2 percentage points in detection, YOLOv12 by 6.1 percentage points in instance segmentation, and reduces endpoint error (EPE) of baseline by 12.37% on Dark-traffic. On the LIS benchmark, the end-to-end trained SLVM surpasses Swin Transformer+EnlightenGAN and ConvNeXt-T+EnlightenGAN by an average of 11 percentage points across key metrics, and exceeds Mask RCNN (with light enhancement) by 3.1 percentage points. The Dark-traffic dataset and complete code is released at https://github.com/alanli1997/slvm.