Although the multi-task convolutional neural networks (MTCNN) face detection algorithm has achieved good results in some face recognition tasks, the accuracy of face detection needs to be improved in the face of some complex small-scale and multi-person face detection tasks. An improved MTCNN algorithm was proposed. Firstly, the intersection over union (IoU) threshold parameter was fine-tuned when creating the data set to classify face samples more accurately. Secondly, replacing the max pooling layer of the network with convolutional layers can improve network performance. Finally, the squeeze-excitation(SE) attention mechanism was introduced into the O-Net network to improve the feature expression ability of the network. The test results show that compared with the original MTCNN algorithm, the detection accuracy of the P-Net network and R-Net network of the improved algorithm has increased by 1%, and the detection accuracy of the O-Net network has increased by 0.5%. Moreover, the improved algorithm performs better in the actual face detection task.