This study proposes an improved YOLO v5 method to solve the problems of inaccurate classification and insufficient feature extraction from power equipment infrared images. First, the visible light data and infrared images of the power equipment were fused using the transfer learning method. The triplet attention mechanism was then embedded into the feature extraction network for weighted intensification of key feature information. Finally, different targets were identified using multiscale fusion.The results show that compared with faster R-CNN and SSD, the proposed method has higher recognition accuracy and efficiency and is suitable for image recognition of multi-type power equipment in complex backgrounds. This method realizes a lightweight network model with a size of only 4.1 MB, which is a reduction of 80.8% compared to that of SSD, providing a novel and feasible scheme for intelligent infrared image detection of power equipment.