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Defective insulator detection is an essential part of transmission line inspections based on unmanned aerial vehicles. It can timely discover insulator defects and repair them to avoid a power transmission accident. The detection speed of defective insulators based on artificial intelligence directly affects inspection efficiency. To improve the detection speed of defective insulators based on YOLOv5s, an improved detection method with faster detection speed and acceptable precision is proposed. First, a new ResNet unit with three branches is designed based on depthwise separable convolution with kernel three and average pooling. To reduce parameters, the new ResNet unit is used to replace the original ResNet unit used in the CSP1_X module in YOLOv5s. Besides, we also introduce channel shuffle in the CSP1_X module to facilitate the flow of feature information from different channels. Second, a new residual CBL module is designed based on depthwise separable and standard convolution. The new residual CBL module is used to replace the two CBL modules used in the CSP2_X module in YOLOv5s to reduce parameters and extract more useful features. Third, we design a separate, coordinated attention module by introducing location information into channel attention. The new attention module is added to the end of the CSP2_X module to improve the ability to extract insulator location information. Besides, we also use convolution to replace the focus model to reduce computation. Compared with defective insulator detection methods, the proposed method has smaller parameters, floating-point operations per second, and higher frames per second. Although it has lower mean precision, it has a faster detection speed. Besides, the increase in detection speed is greater than the decrease in mean precision.