Helmets are one of the important measures to ensure the safety of construction workers. Because the harm caused by not wearing safety helmets as required is great, the wearing of safety helmets has also attracted more and more people’s attention. At present, the main method of helmet detection is the YOLO series of algorithms. They often only focus on detection accuracy, ignoring the actual situation during deployment, that is, a balance between accuracy and speed is required. Therefore, this paper proposes a helmet detection application based on YOLOv4 algorithm, and combined with the MobileNet network, it has achieved good results in terms of detection accuracy and speed. Through transfer learning and tuning parameters, the mAP and FPS values detected in this paper on the public safety helmet datasets are 94.47% and 27.36%, which exceed the research work of some similar papers. This paper also combines YOLOv4 and MobileNetv3 networks to propose a mobileNet-based YOLOv4 helmet detection application. Its mAP and FPS values are 91.47% and 42.58%, respectively, which meet the accuracy and real-time requirements of current hardware deployment.