An imaging flame detection system for detecting flames of fires against false alarms using continuous imaging and pattern recognition of infrared (IR) images of a protected area under surveillance by the system. The system uses a Silicon (Si) Charge-Coupled-Device (CCD) array to detect the IR images, which first have passed through a wide field of view lens to establish a wide surveillance of the protected area, and have been filtered by a narrow band IR filter centered at 1,140 nm wavelength to remove false alarms originated from background sources of the protected area. Then, the system digitizes and thresholds these images into binarized images for pattern recognition to remove any remaining false alarms. To accomplish this function, this process forms blobs of suspect flames from the binarized images, extracts from these blobs characteristic parameters for statistical evaluation of the suspect blobs, matches these parameters with those stored in a system database to establish a vote for a flame or a false alarm, and then declares the suspect blob as a flame when the voting value exceeds an empirically-determined threshold. On a conclusive declaration, the system automatically activates a warning for suppressant release to put out the flame.