FlameTrack

Release	Quality	Documentation

FlameTrack is a desktop application for analysing fire spread from infrared and visible-light recordings. It corrects perspective distortion, detects the flame edge frame-by-frame, and stores all results in a documented HDF5 file.

Features

• Two experiment modes — Room Corner (6-point calibration) and Lateral Flame Spread (4-point calibration)
• Automatic point sorting — click the corners in any order, FlameTrack arranges them correctly
• Six edge-detection methods with adjustable thresholds and optional Otsu masking
• Parallel processing — Room Corner runs both panels simultaneously
• Reproducible results — every HDF5 output file stores the FlameTrack version and git commit used

Installation

pip install flametrack
flametrack

Requires Python 3.10 – 3.13. Full documentation: flametrack.readthedocs.io

Typical workflow

1. Click Open Folder and select your experiment directory
2. Place calibration points on the specimen plate corners
3. Enter the plate dimensions in millimetres
4. Click Dewarp → Find Edge
5. Open the resulting .h5 file in Python, MATLAB, or any HDF5 viewer

Reading results in Python

import h5py
import numpy as np

with h5py.File("my_experiment_results_RCE.h5", "r") as f:
    edge = f["edge_results"]["data"][:]   # shape: (frames, rows)
    # edge[t, y] = x-position of the flame edge at row y in frame t

Development installation

git clone https://github.com/FireDynamics/FlameTrack.git
cd FlameTrack
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
pytest tests/unit/

Citation

If you use FlameTrack in your work, please cite:

For the latest release (v1.0.1) the BibTeX entry is:

@software{wurzburger_2026_flametrack,
  author       = {Würzburger, Minh Tam and
                  Fehr, Marc},
  title        = {FlameTrack — Flame Spread Analysis Tool},
  month        = apr,
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v1.0.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.19891130},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19891130},
}

If you used a different version, please use Zenodo to get the correct citation information.

Contributing

Bug reports, feature suggestions, and pull requests are welcome. Please open an issue or see the Contributing Guide.

License

See the LICENSE file for details.