Early forest fire image recognition plays an important role in timely fire fighting. This paper proposes an early forest fire recognition method based on C-GhostNet network. The C-GhostNet network is an improved version of GhostNet, which mainly consists of a series of c-ghost bottlenecks, each c-ghost bottleneck mainly consists of two c-ghost modules. Through the concat operation and channel shuffle, the c-ghost module establishes the relationship between the input data and the output features generated by the original ghost module, so that GhostNet network has the ability to capture contextual features. The experimental results show that the C-GhostNet network achieves better recognition performance than GhostNet without introducing additional computational load, and the running speed reaches about 20FPS, which basically realizes real-time recognition. In addition, like GhostN et, the C-GhostNet network is also a lightweight network.