There are a lot of flammable materials in the textile workshop, and once a fire occurs, it will cause property damage and casualties. At present, smoke detection in textile workshops mainly relies on temperature‐sensing smoke sensors with low detection rate and poor real‐time performance, which cannot meet the task of smoke detection in complex environments. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved mixed Gaussian and YOLOv5 smoke detection algorithm for textile workshops. In order to reduce the interference of static background in smoke detection, an improved gaussian mixture algorithm is used to extract suspected smoke areas in video by using the dynamic characteristics of smoke. Then, an adaptive attention module is added to the feature pyramid infrastructure of the YOLOv5 target detection network to improve the multi‐scale target recognition ability. In addition, the focal loss function is used to reduce the impact of background and foreground class imbalances on the detection results. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed method is 94.7%, and the average detection speed is 66.7 FPS. By comparing with the existing state‐of‐the‐art algorithms, the detection capability of this method has been significantly improved. At the same time, it has high real‐time performance and detection accuracy in smoke detection in textile workshops.