This paper proposed a method that detects emergency situations in a video stream using MHI (Motion History Image) and template matching for a video-based intelligent security system. The proposed method creates a MHI of each human object through image processing technique such as background removing based on GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model), labeling and accumulating the foreground images, then the obtained MHI is compared with the existing MHI templates for detecting an emergency situation. To evaluate the proposed emergency detection method, a set of experiments on the dataset of video clips captured from a security camera has been conducted. And we successfully detected emergency situations using the proposed method. In addition, the implemented system also provides MMS (Multimedia Message Service) so that a security manager can deal with the emergency situation appropriately.