In order to improve the detection accuracy of an algorithm in the complex environment of a coal mine, including low-illumination, motion-blur, occlusions, small-targets, and background-interference conditions; reduce the number of model parameters; improve the detection speed of the algorithm; and make it meet the real-time detection requirements of edge equipment, a real-time obstacle detection method in the driving of driverless rail locomotives based on DeblurGANv2 and improved YOLOv4 is proposed in this study. A blurred image was deblurred using DeblurGANv2. The improved design was based on YOLOv4, and the lightweight feature extraction network MobileNetv2 was used to replace the original CSPDarknet53 network to improve the detection speed of the algorithm. There was a high amount of background interference in the target detection of the coal mine scene. In order to strengthen the attention paid to the target, the SANet attention module was embedded in the Neck network to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm under low-illumination, target-occlusion, small-target, and other conditions. To further improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm, the K-means++ algorithm was adopted to cluster prior frames, and the focal loss function was introduced to increase the weight loss of small-target samples. The experimental results show that the deblurring of the motion-blurred image can effectively improve the detection accuracy of obstacles and reduce missed detections. Compared with the original YOLOv4 algorithm, the improved YOLOv4 algorithm increases the detection speed by 65.85% to 68 FPS and the detection accuracy by 0.68% to 98.02%.