Abstract: As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) image has the characteristics of complex background, high resolution, and large scale differences between targets, a real-time detection algorithm named as YOLOv5sm+ is proposed in this paper. First, the influence of network width and depth on UAV image detection performance was analyzed, and an improved shallow network based on YOLOv5s, which is named as YOLOv5sm, was proposed to improve the detection accuracy of major targets in UAV image through improving the utilization of spatial features extracted by residual dilated convolution module that could increase the receptive field. Then, a feature fusion module SCAM was designed, which could improve the utilization of detailed information by local feature self-supervision and could improve classification accuracy of medium and large targets through effective feature fusion. Finally, a detection head structure consisting with decoupled regression and classification head was proposed to further improve the classification accuracy. The experimental results on VisDrone dataset show that when intersection over union equals 0.5 mean average precision (mAP50) of the proposed YOLOv5sm+ model reaches 60.6%. Compared with YOLOv5s model, mAP50 of YOLOv5sm+ has increased 4.1%. In addition, YOLOv5sm+ has higher detection speed. The migration experiment on the DIOR remote sensing dataset also verified the effectiveness of the proposed model. The improved model has the characteristics of low false alarm rate and high recognition rate under overlapping conditions, and is suitable for the object detection task of UAV images.