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Unmanned aerial vehicle insulator detection that aims to recognize defective insulators from transmission lines has made significant progress in recent years. However, it still faces challenges, such as the complex background of aerial images and the small memory of unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a refined insulator detection algorithm that integrates the attention mechanism in YOLOv8 to improve the feature extraction ability. Specifically, this paper introduces a fast vision transformers structure in the you only look once (YOLO) v8 backbone section to enhance feature extraction by capturing local and global features. Additionally, the global attention mechanism is incorporated in the neck for additional feature extraction by merging comprehensive spatial and channel information into the output. Furthermore, we amalgamate depth‐wise convolution, graph convolution, and residual operation in the global attention mechanism module. This design can mitigate the issues of gradient vanishing or exploding and meanwhile enhance the distinction between spatial attention and channel attention. The proposed model is then applied to a public dataset and a set of real images from a specific power station, and the detection results show that it outperforms many competitors in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and memory size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]