Here we present a simple flame detection method for an infrared (IR) thermal camera based real-time fire surveillance digital signal processor (DSP) system. Infrared thermal cameras are especially advantageous for unattended fire surveillance. All-weather monitoring is possible, regardless of illumination and climate conditions, and the data quantity to be processed is one-third that of color videos. Conventional IR camera-based fire detection methods used mainly pixel-based temporal correlation functions. In the temporal correlation function-based methods, temporal changes in pixel intensity generated by the irregular motion and spreading of the flame pixels are measured using correlation functions. The correlation values of non-flame regions are uniform, but the flame regions have irregular temporal correlation values. To satisfy the requirement of early detection, all fire detection techniques should be practically applied within a very short period of time. The conventional pixel-based correlation function is computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose an IR camera-based simple flame detection algorithm optimized with a compact embedded DSP system to achieve early detection. To reduce the computational load, block-based calculations are used to select the candidate flame region and measure the temporal motion of flames. These functions are used together to obtain the early flame detection algorithm. The proposed simple algorithm was tested to verify the required function and performance in real-time using IR test videos and a real-time DSP system. The findings indicated that the system detected the flames within 5 to 20 seconds, and had a correct flame detection ratio of 100% with an acceptable false detection ratio in video sequence level.