An improved DETR (detection with transformers) object detection framework is proposed to realize accurate detection and recognition of characters on shipping containers. ResneSt is used as a backbone network with split attention to extract features of different dimensions by multi-channel weight convolution operation, thus increasing the overall feature acquisition ability of the backbone. In addition, multi-scale location encoding is introduced on the basis of the original sinusoidal position encoding model, improving the sensitivity of input position information for the transformer structure. Compared with the original DETR framework, our model has higher confidence regarding accurate detection, with detection accuracy being improved by 2.6%. In a test of character detection and recognition with a self-built dataset, the overall accuracy can reach 98.6%, which meets the requirements of logistics information identification acquisition.