In the target recognition of infrared thermal imaging images, a detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv5 for infrared low-resolution targets was proposed to address the poor detection of low-resolution small targets and low detection rate of complex-scale targets. The LLVIP infrared dataset was selected and the detection effect was compared by introducing different attention mechanisms. The attention mechanism with the best effect was selected to improve the loss function of the target detection network and improve the detection rate of small targets. A TiX650 thermal imager was utilized to acquire small target image samples for optimal sampling and broadening of the original dataset, and the YOLOv5 network was trained using the improved before and after, respectively. The performance improvement of the model was evaluated from the model-training and target detection results, and the experimental results demonstrate that compared with the original training model, the improved YOLOv5 training model has a significant improvement in the detection accuracy of low-resolution small targets in the same scene of infrared imaging and exhibits a low miss detection rate.