In this study, the authors present a new approach to detect fire flame by processing and analysing the stationary camera videos. For a fire detection system, it is desired to be sensitive and reliable. The proposed method improves not only the sensitivity but also the reliability through reducing the susceptibility to false alarms. The proposed approach based on multi‐feature, i.e. chromatic features, dynamic features, texture features, and contour features, can both improve the sensitivity and reliability in fire detection. In their approach, the authors adopt a novel algorithm to extract the moving region and analyse the frequency of flickers. Experimental results show that the proposed method can run in real‐time and performs favourably against the state‐of‐the‐art methods with higher accuracy in fire videos, lower false alarm rates in non‐fire videos and faster response time.