Recently, object detection methods have developed rapidly and have been widely used in many areas. In many scenarios, helmet wearing detection is very useful, because people are required to wear helmets to protect their safety when they work in construction sites or cycle in the streets. However, for the problem of helmet wearing detection in complex scenes such as construction sites and workshops, the detection accuracy of current approaches still needs to be improved. In this work, we analyze the mechanism and performance of several detection algorithms and identify two feasible base algorithms that have complementary advantages. We use one base algorithm to detect relatively large heads and helmets. Also, we use the other base algorithm to detect relatively small heads, and we add another convolutional neural network to detect whether there is a helmet above each head. Then, we integrate these two base algorithms with an ensemble method. In this method, we first propose an approach to merge information of heads and helmets from the base algorithms, and then propose a linear function to estimate the confidence score of the identified heads and helmets. Experiments on a benchmark data set show that, our approach increases the precision and recall for base algorithms, and the mean Average Precision of our approach is 0.93, which is better than many other approaches. With GPU acceleration, our approach can achieve real-time processing on contemporary computers, which is useful in practice.