Compared with traditional methods, video smoke detection has many advantages, such as fast response, noncontact and so forth. For the sake of detecting smoke in the nighttime with 0 lux around, the paper presents a smoke recognition method based on active infrared CCD video image. Experimental results show that it can well recognize smoke to reach the aim of smoke-detection in the nighttime, by extracting the feature that smoke reveals while the plume of smoke upwards, analyzing feature values, studying smoke recognition methods and comparing with the interferences.