As an important part of automobile, the safety and durability of tire have attracted more and more attention. Tire defect detection is an important link to ensure tire quality, while traditional detection methods have problems such as low efficiency, high false detection rate and high labor intensity. Therefore, this study aims to develop an efficient and accurate tire defect identification and classification technique to improve the efficiency and accuracy of tire inspection. In this paper, based on YOLO (You Only Look Once) v5 algorithm, tire defect recognition and classification are studied. Firstly, the data sets containing various types of tire defects were collected and sorted out, and the data sets were preprocessed. Then, by constructing, training and optimizing the YOLOv5 tire defect recognition model, the fast and accurate recognition of tire defects was realized. Finally, the performance of the model was evaluated through experiments and compared with the existing methods. The experimental results show that the tire defect recognition and classification method based on YOLOv5 proposed in this study has high accuracy. Compared with traditional methods, this method has a significant improvement in detection speed and accuracy.