1. A fire detection system, comprising: at least two spatially resolved fire detectors having at least a partially overlapping field of view of a protected area to generate fire cluster information for the protected area; a system controller that receives the fire cluster information from the fire detectors and pairs fire clusters detected by the at least two fire detectors and validates the fire cluster pairs as representing a fire; wherein the system controller validates fire cluster pairs based on time cluster detection epochs by computing a time interval between the detection of the fire clusters by the at least two fire detectors, comparing the resulting computed time interval with a programmable threshold value, and if the computed time interval is less than the programmable threshold, then validating the fire cluster pairs as consistently paired, and if the computed time interval is greater than the programmable threshold value, then indicating the fire cluster pairs as not being consistently paired.