Advanced ship detection technologies play a critical role in improving maritime safety by enabling the rapid identification of vessels and other maritime targets, thereby mitigating the risk of collisions and optimizing traffic efficiency. Traditional detection methods often demonstrate high sensitivity to minor variations in target appearance but face significant limitations in generalization, making them ill-suited to the complex and dynamic nature of maritime environments. To address these challenges, an enhanced ship detection method, referred to as YOLOv5-SE, has been proposed, which builds upon the YOLOv5 framework. This approach incorporates attention mechanisms within the backbone network to improve the model's focus on key features of small targets, dynamically adjusting the importance of each channel to boost representational capacity and detection accuracy. In addition, a refined version of the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) loss function has been introduced to optimize the loss associated with target bounding box prediction, thereby improving localization accuracy and ensuring more precise alignment between predicted and ground-truth boxes. Furthermore, the conventional coupled detection head in YOLOv5 is replaced by a Decoupled Head, facilitating better adaptability to various target shapes and accelerating model convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that these modifications significantly enhance ship detection performance, with mean Average Precision (mAP) at IoU 0.5 reaching 94.9% and 95.1%, representing improvements of 3.1% and 1.2% over the baseline YOLOv5 model, respectively. These advancements underscore the efficacy of the proposed methodology in improving detection accuracy and robustness in challenging maritime settings.