For the low detection accuracy problem of small targets and low-contrast defects on the surface of latex gloves，an improved YOLOv（you only look once version）8n algorithm for defects detection on the surface of latex gloves is proposed.The receptive field attention convolution module is introduced in the feature extraction network to dynamically adjust the spatial feature weights within the receptive field，and to enhance the network's focus on defect features. The C2f module is redesigned based on the proposed multi-scale convolution，which captures the contextual information from shallow features through multi-scale convolutional kernels，and improves the network's ability to extract shallow features.The context and the spatial feature calibration network are added to the feature fusion network，where feature calibration refines and aligns contextual information and spatial features，and further enhances the representation of defect features.Experimental results show that on the homemade dataset，the mean average precision（mAP）of the improved algorithm reaches 93.2%，which is 3.1%higher than that of YOLOv8n.It effectively improves the surface defect detection accuracy of latex gloves.In addition，on the VisDrone2019Det and steel defect detection datasets，the mAP reaches 36.1%and 79.8%，respectively，which are 1.1%and 2.7%higher than that of YOLOv8n，and further verifies the effectiveness of the improved algorithm.