Defect detection plays a crucial role in the manufacturing industry, ensuring the quality of industrial products. Despite advancements in this field, current defect detection methods face two primary challenges: (1) extracting visually similar features from the background poses difficult and (2) these methods struggle to identify tiny defects in the target objects. We present a feature enhancement module called the SE-CAR, which aims to handle the identified problems effectively. This module is designed to efficiently capture tiny defects in images, prioritize defect information features, and ultimately enhance the model’s predictive performance and accuracy in defect recognition tasks. In addition, Distance-IoU Non-Maximum Suppression is employed as a substitution for the original Non-Maximum Suppression. This enhances the recognition accuracy of bounding boxes, ensuring that the model maintains high detection accuracy even after complex scenarios. Moreover, the proposed methodology exhibits broad applicability across a wide spectrum of prevalent defect detection paradigms. In empirical experiments, we employ the YOLOv7 architecture as the foundation framework, integrating the proposed methodologies for the purpose of detecting defects in the membrane. The empirical evidence demonstrates a notable improvement in the performance of detecting defects in membrane products using the SE-CAR feature enhancement module and Distance-IoU Non-Maximum Suppression algorithm. In comparison to baseline networks, an increase in mAp by 6.29%, precision by 1.63%, and recall by 8.76%.