Fires are the most common disaster and early fire detection is of great importance to minimize the consequent damage. Simple sensors including smoke detectors are widely used for the purpose but they are able to sense fires only at close proximity. Recently, due to the rapid advances of relevant technologies, vision-based fire sensing has attracted growing attention. In this paper, a novel visual sensing technique to automatically detect fire is presented. The proposed technique consists of multiple steps of image processing: pixel-level, block-level, and frame level. At the first step, fire flame pixel candidates are selected based on their color values in YIQ space from the image of a camera which is installed as a vision sensor at a fire scene. At the second step, the dynamic parts of flames are extracted by comparing two consecutive images. These parts are then represented in regularly divided image blocks to reduce pixel-level detection error and simplify following processing. Finally, the temporal change of the detected blocks is analyzed to confirm the spread of fire. The proposed technique was tested using real fire images and it worked quite reliably.