  This paper presents a novel method to estimate the power consumption of
distinct active components on an electronic carrier board by using thermal
imaging. The components and the board can be made of heterogeneous material
such as plastic, coated microchips, and metal bonds or wires, where a special
coating for high emissivity is not required. The thermal images are recorded
when the components on the board are dissipating power. In order to enable
reliable estimates, a segmentation of the thermal image must be available that
can be obtained by manual labeling, object detection methods, or exploiting
layout information. Evaluations show that with low-resolution consumer infrared
cameras and dissipated powers larger than 300mW, mean estimation errors of 10%
can be achieved.
