The iPhone 15 Pro's Depth Maps

Since 2017, Apple have supported depth maps in the images its iPhones capture either via LiDAR scanners, 3D time-of-flight scanner-less LIDAR or structured-light 3D scanning. These depth maps, along with other imagery, are stored in High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) container files. These files can contain multiple images and vast amounts of metadata. This format was originally designed between 2013 and 2015 and Apple adopted its HEIC variant in 2017. Since then, HEIC files are the default storage container format for images captured on the iPhone. But with that said, it is possible to use the JPEG format instead if things like depth maps and HDR are not of interest. 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 ima ... Read full article.