Flame image recognition is of great significance in the fire detection and prevention. In this paper, in order to improve the accuracy of fire recognition, a fast stochastic configuration network (FSCN) method based on an improved sparrow search algorithm (ISSA) is proposed. In the design of fast stochastic configuration network (FSCN), the gradual increase of hidden layer nodes in the original stochastic configuration network (SCN) is canceled, and the number of them is set directly. An improved sparrow search algorithm (ISSA) is used to generate the input weights and biases of hidden layer nodes. At the same time, the supervisory mechanism is retained to judge the weights and biases of all hidden layer nodes, and ISSA is used to regenerate corresponding weights and biases for the nodes that do not meet the constraints in the supervisory mechanism. In the ISSA, sine map, adaptive adjustment of hyper-parameters and mutation strategy are used to improve the optimization ability of the original sparrow search algorithm (SSA). Some parameters in FSCN are optimized by ISSA to make it have better classification performance. Finally, the image processing technology is used to extract features from the flame images and the interference images, and then the feature vectors are obtained to train the ISSA-FSCN. Several simulation experiments have been carried out to verify effectiveness of the proposed ISSA-FSCN method. In the performance verification of ISSA on CEC test suit, ISSA averagely outperforms other algorithms by 33.6% in the average results of 20 functions. In the performance verification of FSCN, the average results of accuracy, precision, recall, F1 and auc are compared. In the experiment 1, ISSA-FSCN averagely outperforms other algorithms by 19.7%, 14.7%, 12.8%, 14.5% and 23.0%. In the experiment 2, ISSA-FSCN averagely outperforms other algorithms by 2.3%, 2.1%, 2.5%, 6.0%, 3.2%. In the experiment 3, ISSA-FSCN averagely outperforms other algorithms by 5.9%, 4.0%, 4.1%, 4.1%, 6.8%.