Flame Tracker: An image analysis program to measure flame characteristics

In combustion research, digital cameras offer a non-invasive way to record experiments. Image and video processing are powerful tools to extract information such as flame size, color, temperature, and their variations in time. The Flame Tracker is a Python-based image and video processing application that can be used for isolating a flame (or a luminous object) from the background on a frame by frame basis. The Flame Tracker has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) with video editing tools, such as trimming, cropping, and perspective correction, and a selection of three tracking methods. Two of these methods are automatic, in the sense that after the filtering parameters are set, the program applies them to the rest of the video without the need of further input, allowing the processing of a large number of images/frames. The program is open source, and structured in a way to be relatively easy to understand and modify, thus additional tracking methods could be implemented. The Flame Tracker is intended for the combustion research community to facilitate the video processing and the tracking of flame position, length, area, and spread rate variations in time. These tracking methods could potentially be applied to other research fields as well.