[[abstract]]A new image-based real-time flame detection method is proposed in this paper. First, fire flame features based on the HSI color model are extracted by analyzing 70 flame images. Then, based on these flame features, regions with fire-like colors are roughly separated from an image. Besides segmenting fire flame regions, background objects with similar fire colors or caused by color shift resulted from the reflection of fire flames are also separated from the image. In order to get rid of these spurious fire-like regions, the image difference method and the invented color masking technique are applied. Finally, a simple method is devised to estimate the burning degree of fire flames so that users could be informed with a proper wa...