The invention discloses a target detection method based on an SSA sharpening attention mechanism, in the method, user-defined sharpening filtering is introdued into a space attention module for the first time, and combined with a channel attention module for use, thereby reducing the influence of interference factors on the SSA sharpening effect, and serving the sharpening effect; according to the invention, the edge information of the detected object in the neural network is enhanced spatially, and object positioning is enhanced. Edge information of large objects can be perfected, existence of small and medium objects in an output layer can be improved, and the detection effect is improved; according to the invention, the combination mode and the embedding position of the SSA space sharpening module and the channel attention module are perfected. Compared with a space attention module in the CBAM, the effect on the lightweight target detection model is better. According to the SSA space sharpening module, the required calculation amount and parameter amount are extremely small, the detection speed is hardly influenced, and the lightweight module is high in practicability, plug-and-play and easy to implement.