Fire disasters are very serious problems that may cause damages to ecological systems, infrastructure, properties, and even a threat to human lives; therefore, detecting fi res at their earliest stage is of importance. Inspired by the technological advancements in artifi cial intelligence and image processing in solving problems in diff erent applications, this encourages adopting those technologies in reducing the damage and harm caused by fi re. This study attempts to propose an intelligent fi re detection method by investigating three approaches to detect fi re based on three diff erent color models: RGB, YCbCr, and HSV were presented. The RGB method is applied based on the relationship among the red, green and blue values of pixels in images. In the YCbCr color model, image processing and machine learning techniques are used for morphological processing and automatic recognition of fi re images. In turn, for HSV, supervised machine learning techniques are adopted, namely decision rule and Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Further, the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm was deployed for the GMM parameters estimation. The three proposed models were tested on two data sets, one of which contains fi re images, the other consists of non-fi re images with some having fi re-like colors to test the effi ciency of the proposed methods. The experimental results showed that the overall accuracies on two data sets for the RGB, YCbCr, and HSV methods were satisfactory and were effi cient in detecting the outdoor and indoor fi res.