A novel approach is proposed in this paper for automatic forest fire detection from video. Based on 3D point cloud of the collected sample fire pixels, Gaussian mixture model is built and helps segment some possible flame regions in single image. Then the new specific flame pattern is defined for forest, and three types of fire colors are labeled accordingly. With 11 static features including color distributions, texture parameters and shape roundness, the static SVM classifier is trained and filters the segmented results. Using defined overlapping degree and varying degree, the remained candidate regions are matched among consecutive frames. Subsequently the variations of color, texture, roundness, area, contour are computed, then the average and the mean square deviation of them are obtained. Together with the flickering frequency from temporal wavelet based Fourier descriptors analysis of flame contour, 27 dynamic features are used to train the dynamic SVM classifier, which is applied for final decision. Our approach has been tested with dozens of video clips, and it can detect forest fire while recognize the fire like objects, such as red house, bright light and flying flag. Except for the acceptable accuracy, our detection algorithm performs in real time, which proves its value for computer vision based forest fire surveillance.