UAV is difficult to detect by visual methods at a long distance, so a UAV detection and tracking algorithm is proposed based on image super-resolution. Firstly, a saliency transformation algorithm is built to focus on the suspected area. Then, a generative adversarial network is established on the basis of ROI to realize the super-resolution of weak targets and restore the high-resolution details of target features. Finally, the cooperative attention module is built to recognize and track UAV. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm has strong robustness. © 2022 Bin Li et al.