Halide Does Deep Dive Into iPhone SEs Software-Based Portrait Mode
Summary
Though it is a budget device with a single-lens camera, the iPhone SE features support for Portrait Mode, enabled through the powerful A13 chip in the smartphone. It is the first of Apples smartphones to offer Portrait Mode photos created entirely with software techniques rather than hardware, which prompted the developers behind popular iOS camera app Halide to take a deep dive into how it works. As Halide developer Ben Sandofsky points out, the iPhone XR is also a single-lens camera with Portrait Mode support, but the iPhone XR gets depth information through hardware. The iPhone SEs Portrait Mode is somewhat limited because it only works with people, which is due to the neural network that powers the feature. When a Portrait Mode image without a person is captured, it fails in various ways because it cant create an accurate estimated depth map.