A real-time object detection algorithm YOLO-C for complex construction environment was proposed for the problems of cluttered environment, obscured objects, large object scale range, unbalanced positive and negative samples, and insufficient real-time of existing detection algorithms, which commonly exist in construction environment. The extracted low-level features were fused with the high-level features to enhance the global sensing capability of the network, and a small object detection layer was designed to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm for objects of different scales. A Channel-Spatial Attention (CSA) module was designed to enhance the object features and suppress the background features. In the loss function part, VariFocal Loss was used to calculate the classification loss to solve the problem of positive and negative sample imbalance. GhostConv was used as the basic convolutional block to construct the GCSP (Ghost Cross Stage Partial) structure to reduce the number of parameters and the amount of computation. For complex construction environments, a concrete construction site object detection dataset was constructed, and comparison experiments for various algorithms were conducted on the constructed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the YOLO?C has higher detection accuracy and smaller parameters, making it more suitable for object detection tasks in complex construction environments.