Recently, botnets, domain name hijacking, phishing websites and other typosquatting attacks are more and more frequent, seriously threatening the security of society and individuals. Therefore, the typosquatting detection is an important part of network protection. The current typosquatting detections mainly focus on public domain names, and the detection methods are mainly based on edit distance which is difficult to fully reflect the visual characteristics of domain names. In addition, using the related information of the given domains for determination can help to increase the detection efficiency, but it also introduces a large additional cost. Based on this, a lightweight detection strategy only based on domain name strings was adopted for typosquatting detection. By comprehensively considering the influence of character locations, character similarities and operation types on the vision of domain names, the edit distance algorithm based on visual characteristics was proposed. According to the characteristics of typosquatting, firstly the domain names were preprocessed, then different weights were given to the characters according to their positions, character similarities and operation types, and finally, the typosquatting determination was performed by calculating the edit distance value. Experimental results show that compared with the detection method based on edit distance, the typosquatting lightweight detection method based on visual features has the F1 value increased by 5.98% and 13.56% respectively when the threshold value is 1 and 2, which proves that the proposed method has a good detection effect.