In recent years, the task of maritime emergency rescue has increased, while the cost of time for traditional methods of search and rescue is pretty long with poor effect subject to the constraints of the complex circumstances around the sea, the effective conditions, and the support capability. This paper applies deep learning and proposes a YOLOv5s‐SwinDS algorithm for target detection in distress at sea. Firstly, the backbone network of the YOLOv5s algorithm is replaced by swin transformer, and a multi‐level feature fusion module is introduced to enhance the feature expression ability for maritime targets. Secondly, deformable convolutional networks v2 (DCNv2) is used instead of traditional convolution to improve the recognition capability for irregular targets when the neck network features are output. Finally, the CIoU loss function is replaced with SIoU to reduce the redundant box effectively while accelerating the convergence and regression of the predicted box. Experimenting on the publicly dataset SeaDronesSee, the Precision$Precision$, Recall$Recall$, mAP0.5$mAP_{0.5}$ and mAP0.5−0.95$mAP_{0.5-0.95}$ of YOLOv5s‐SwinDS model are 87.9%, 75.8%, 79.1% and 42.9%, respectively, which get higher results than the original YOLOv5s model, the YOLOv7 series of models, and the YOLOv8 series of models. The experiments verifies that the algorithm has good performance in detecting maritime distress targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]