Distribution line insulators play a key role in electrical insulation and supporting lines in distribution lines. Insulator defects due to overvoltage, thermal stress, and environmental pollution may trigger power transmission instability and line collapse, thus threatening the safe operation of distribution networks. However, distribution line insulators often present detection challenges due to their compact dimensions, diverse flaw types, and frequent installation in populated areas with visually cluttered environments. The combination of these factors, including small defect sizes, varying failure patterns, and complex background interference, in both urban and rural settings, creates significant difficulties for precise defect identification in these critical components. In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a defect recognition algorithm for distribution line insulators based on the improved YOLO11 model. Firstly, the algorithm combines the detection head of the original model with the Adaptively Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) module to effectively fuse defect features at different resolution levels and improve the model’s ability to recognize multi-scale defect features. Secondly, a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) replaces the FPN + PAN structure of the original model to achieve a more effective transfer of contextual information in order to facilitate the model’s efficiency in performing defect feature fusion, and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) Attention mechanism is embedded in the BiFPN output so that the model is able to give priority attention to defective features on insulators in complex recognition environments. Finally, the ShuffleNetV2 module is used to reduce the parameters of the improved model by replacing the large-parameter C3k2 module at the end of the backbone network for easy deployment on lightweight and small devices. The experimental results show that the improved model performs well in the distribution line insulator defect detection task, with an accuracy precision (AP) and mean accuracy precision (mAP) of 97.0% and 98.1%, respectively, which are 1.4% and 0.7% higher than the original YOLO11 model.