With the increase in wind power generation, wind turbine blades require regular inspections to ensure they continue to operate safely. You only look once (YOLO) is one of the most widely used object detection algorithms and is easy to deploy into drone devices. To enhance the real-time detection of small target defects in wind turbine blades, this paper proposes an improved attention and feature balanced YOLO (AFB-YOLO) algorithm based on YOLOv5s. Specifically, AFB-YOLO improves the feature pyramid network by using weighted feature fusion and cross-scale connections. The improved feature pyramid network solves the problem that most previous feature pyramid networks treat all input features equally, and obtains more feature information. Furthermore, the coordinate attention (CA) module is introduced into the network to augment the representations of the objects of interest. Finally, the paper redesigned the loss function through efficient intersection over union (EIoU) loss to make the model obtain a better localization effect. The experimental results on the imagery of wind turbine blade defects indicate that our method shows significant gains in performance. The mean average precision (mAP50) of AFB-YOLO is 83.7% and the detection accuracy is improved by 4.0% compared to the original YOLOv5s model. The experiments in this paper demonstrate that AFB-YOLO is more effective and robust than state-of-theart detectors.INDEX TERMS wind turbine blade, YOLOv5s, feature fusion, coordinate attention, EIoU loss.