This paper discusses the dual use of digital image correlation (DIC) and thermoelastic stress analyses (TSA) for the study of propagating cracks. It is shown that a few critical parameters such as emissivity and the thermoelastic constant, required for the latter can be calibrated with the former. A unified framework is introduced, which treats both experimental techniques equally to locate crack tips, and then evaluate stress intensity factors. This framework allows for a detailed quantitative comparison between both methods. It is found that, for the case at hand, the TSA outputs were less noise sensitive while the DIC method was less dependent on calibration. The proposed procedure was very robust for finding the crack tip location for both experimental methods.