Safety helmet wearing is a powerful guarantee of workers’ personal safety. Aiming at the collected safety helmet wearing pictures have characteristics of high density， small pixels and difficulty to detect， a small object detection algorithm of YOLOv5 （You Only Look Once version 5） for safety helmet was proposed. Firstly， based on YOLOv5 algorithm， the bounding box regression loss function and confidence prediction loss function were optimized to improve the learning effect of the algorithm on the features of dense small objects in training. Secondly， slicing aided fine-tuning and Slicing Aided Hyper Inference （SAHI） were introduced to make the small object produce a larger pixel area by slicing the pictures input into the network， and the effect of network inference and fine-tuning was improved. In the experiments， a dataset containing dense small objects of safety helmets in the industrial scenes was used for training. The experimental results show that compared with the original YOLOv5 algorithm， the improved algorithm can increase the precision by 0.26 percentage points， the recall by 0.38 percentage points. And the mean Average Precision （mAP） of the proposed algorithm reaches 95.77%， which is improved by 0.46 to 13.27 percentage points compared to several algorithms such as the original YOLOv5 algorithm. The results verify that the introduction of slicing aided fine-tuning and SAHI improves the precision and confidence of small object detection and recognition in the dense scenes， reduces the false detection and missed detection cases， and can satisfy the requirements of safety helmet wearing detection effectively.