To tackle the problem of missed detections in long-range detection scenarios caused by the small size of forest fire targets, initiatives have been undertaken to enhance the feature extraction and detection precision of models designed for forest fire imagery. In this study, two algorithms, DenseM-YOLOv5 and SimAM-YOLOv5, were proposed by modifying the backbone network of You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5). From the perspective of lightweight models, compared to YOLOv5, SimAM-YOLOv5 reduced the parameter size by 28.57%. Additionally, although SimAM-YOLOv5 showed a slight decrease in recall rate, it achieved improvements in precision and average precision (AP) to varying degrees. The DenseM-YOLOv5 algorithm achieved a 2.24% increase in precision, as well as improvements of 1.2% in recall rate and 1.52% in AP compared to the YOLOv5 algorithm. Despite having a higher parameter size, the DenseM-YOLOv5 algorithm outperformed the SimAM-YOLOv5 algorithm in terms of precision and AP for forest fire detection.