Manual microscopic examination is still the golden standard for malaria diagnosis. The challenge in the manual microscopy is the fact that its accuracy, consistency and speed of diagnosis depends on the skill of the laboratory technician. It is difficult to get highly skilled laboratory technicians in the remote areas of developing countries. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose and investigate the state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage object detection algorithms for automated malaria parasite screening from thick blood slides. YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 are state-of-the-art object detectors both in terms of accuracy and speed; however, they are not optimized for the detection of small objects such as malaria parasite in microscopic images. To deal with these challenges, we have modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models by increasing the feature scale and by adding more detection layers, without notably decreasing their detection speed. We have proposed one modified YOLOV4 model, called YOLOV4-MOD and two modified models for YOLOV3, which are called YOLOV3-MOD1 and YOLOV3-MOD2. In addition, we have generated new anchor box scales and sizes by using the K-means clustering algorithm to exploit small object detection learning ability of the models.