The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps
Mark Litwintschik (Hacker News):
Finn Jaeger, who is the head of VFX at Replayboys, a film production firm in Hamburg, Germany, posted a screenshot a few weeks ago showing how multiple depth maps were being produced by his iPhone.
He announced he was working on a project called HEIC Shenanigans. This project contains scripts to separate out images and their metadata from HEIC containers as well as convert them into EXR Files. As of this writing, the project contains 374 lines of Python.
In this post, I’ll walk through Finn’s codebase with an example image from an iPhone 15 Pro.
Other commenters here are correct that the LIDAR is too low-resolution to be used as the primary source for the depth maps. In fact, iPhones use four-ish methods, that I know of, to capture depth data, depending on the model and camera used. Traditionally these depth maps were only captured for Portrait photos, but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.
