Effective fire sensing is important to protect lives and property from the disaster. In this paper, we present an intelligent visual sensingmethod for detecting fires based on machine learning techniques. The proposed method involves a two-step process. In the first step,fire and non-fire images are used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN), and in the next step, feature vectors consisting of 256values obtained from the CNN are used for the learning of a support vector machine (SVM). Linear and nonlinear SVMs with differentparameters are intensively tested. We found that the proposed hybrid method using an SVM with a linear kernel effectively increasedthe recall rate of fire image detection without compromising detection accuracy when an imbalanced dataset was used for learning. Thisis a major contribution of this study because recall is important, particularly in the sensing of disaster situations such as fires. In ourexperiments, the proposed system exhibited an accuracy of 96.9% and a recall rate of 92.9% for test image data.