Quickstart¶

This guide walks through a complete FlameTrack session from loading data to saving results.

Before you start, make sure your experiment folder follows the expected structure — see Configuration.

1. Launch FlameTrack¶

flametrack

2. Select Experiment Type¶

Use the Experiment type dropdown:

Lateral Flame Spread (LFS) — single panel, 4 calibration points
Room Corner — two perpendicular panels, 6 calibration points

3. Load Data¶

Click Open Folder and select your experiment. FlameTrack loads the first frame and displays it.

FlameTrack after opening a folder — first IR frame displayed — After opening a folder: the first thermal IR frame fills the image area. No calibration points placed yet.¶

4. Set Camera Rotation¶

Look at the loaded image. If the plate appears rotated, choose the matching angle from the Rotation dropdown — the image rotates immediately. Set this before placing calibration points.

5. Place Calibration Points¶

Click on the four (or six) corners of the specimen plate. The click order does not matter — FlameTrack sorts the points automatically.

Lateral Flame Spread — 4 points

Click the four corners of the plate:

TL ─────────────── TR
│                   │
│   specimen plate  │
│                   │
BL ─────────────── BR

TL = top-left   TR = top-right
BL = bottom-left  BR = bottom-right

Room Corner — 6 points

Click the three corners of the left panel and the three corners of the right panel (the inner vertical edge is shared):

L-TL      L-TR / R-TL      R-TR
  │    left  │    right  │
  │  panel   │   panel   │
L-BL      L-BR / R-BL      R-BR

Place one point at each marked corner (6 total).
The two panels share the inner vertical edge.

Six calibration points placed on a Room Corner experiment — Six calibration points placed on a Room Corner frame. The lines connect the three corners of each panel, meeting at the shared inner edge.¶

Keyboard shortcuts while placing points

D — delete the point nearest to the cursor
C — clear all points

6. Enter Plate Dimensions¶

Enter the physical width and height of the specimen in millimetres. FlameTrack uses these values to compute the output image resolution.

7. Run Dewarping¶

Click Dewarp. FlameTrack corrects perspective distortion for every frame and saves the result to:

processed_data/<experiment_name>_results_RCE.h5

A progress bar shows how many frames have been processed.

8. Run Edge Detection¶

Select the flame direction (left → right or right → left) from the Flame direction dropdown, then click Find Edge.

For a Room Corner experiment both panels are processed simultaneously in separate threads.

Dewarped frame with detected flame edge overlaid — Edge recognition result: the dewarped plate fills the image, and the detected flame edge is overlaid as a cyan line.¶

9. Inspect Results¶

Use the Analysis Y slider to select a horizontal row. The lower plot shows the detected flame-edge position at that height over time.

Flame spread curve — edge position over time for left and right panel — Analysis view: flame edge position over time at the selected height. For a Room Corner experiment both panels (left = red, right = blue mirrored) are shown with a confidence band across all rows.¶

The full result array is stored in the HDF5 file under edge_results (LFS) or edge_results_left / edge_results_right (Room Corner). See Workflows for the complete output format.