Focusing on the characteristics of small objects in images， such as less feature information， low percentage， and easy to be influenced by the environment， a small object detection algorithm based on split mixed attention was proposed， namely SMAM-YOLO. Firstly， by combining Channel Attention （CA） and Spatial Attention （SA）， as well as recombining the connection structures， a Mixed Attention Module （MAM） was proposed to enhance the model’s representation of small object features in spatial dimension. Secondly， according to the different influence of receptive fields with different sizes on the object， a Split Mixed Attention Module （SMAM） was proposed to adaptively adjust the size of the receptive field according to the scale of the input feature map， and the mixed attention was used to enhance the ability to capture small object feature information in different branches. Finally， the core residual module in YOLOv5 was improved by using SMAM， and a feature extraction module CSMAM was proposed on the basis of CSPNet （Cross Stage Partial Network） and SMAM， and the additional computational overhead of CSMAM can be ignored. Experimental results on TinyPerson dataset show that compared with the baseline algorithm YOLOv5s， when the Intersection over Union （IoU） threshold is 0.5， the mean Average Precision （mAP₅₀） of SMAM-YOLO algorithm is improved by 4.15 percentage points， and the detection speed reaches 74 frame/s. In addition， compared with some existing mainstream small object detection models， SMAM-YOLO algorithm improves the mAP₅₀ by 1.46 - 6.84 percentage points on average， and it can meet the requirements of real-time detection.