Fire hazards result in huge damage to the natural resources, public properties, and loss of human and animals lives. Huge fire catches up in remote areas and expands suddenly to nearby areas and eventually becomes uncontrollable. Though sensor based fire detectors are available in market, its function is dependent on the proximity of the sensor to the fire incident, and may not be useful for detecting fire in a remote place where a fire incident is not expected. Hence electronic fire detection systems are inefficient by its nature of operation. Therefore, this article proposes a method for effective fire detection, regardless of the distance of the fire sensing system. The fire detection mechanism is based on the motion occurring between the blocks of a reference frame and the current frame in the test video. This motion estimation based method is capable of detecting the presence of fire at a distance that is better than fire detection systems based on fire sensors. Fire detection performance analysis of the system is found varying based on the block size chosen in motion estimation algorithm. Similarly, detection performance analysis had been found based on the distance of the fire measured from location of the camera. The results obtained in this paper show that the proposed algorithm is suitable for fire detection with a moderate coverage distance with scope for future improvement.