Iphone 13 and 14 have unusably inaccurate depth data. iPhone 12 and iPad Pro is fine

The depth data captured by iPhone 13 and later is significantly of lower quality than depth data captured with iPhone 12, iPad Pro 2020, 2021 and 2022. All these devices more-or-less support the same depth resolution and capture frame rates, and none of the configurations on AVCaptureDevice is able to give more accurate results.

I’ve attached screencaptures in which the difference in accuracy and noise between an iPhone 14 and an iPad Pro 2021 (11”) can be clearly seen. Captures have been made with a slightly adjusted version of Apple's TrueDepthStreamer app (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/additional_data_capture/streaming_depth_data_from_the_truedepth_camera). Is this expected bahavior?

iPhone14 depth stream: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/07bYXtTCFqddpv2XaJQdwttWQ#depthStream-iPhone14

iPad Pro 2021 (11") depth stream: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0294BDECZziOBhS4wWTvtZAZw#depthStream-iPadPro2021-11inch

Enabling depth filtering, alleviates the issue to a small degree, but has as side affect that movement of the subject in the image created a ‘trail’ in the depth data. In our app, this makes the depth data unusable.

I've also created a Issue with Apple: FB12151444

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Apple responded to my reported Issue in the Feedback Assistant with: 'Investigation complete - Works as currently designed.' with no further explanation given. Highly disappointed about this.

I'm just hoping they won't do the same thing in future iPad Pro iterations and it gets fixed in iPhone 15.

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GeertB
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  • Apple provided me a bit more information on this issue in my FeedbackAssistant. Since iPhone 13, they use a different TrueDepth module, which is a lot noisier than the previously used module, leading to the observed behaviour. Seems like there is nothing we can do on software side to get less noisy results on iPhone 13 and newer. Still hoping for using the iPad TrueDepth modules in future iPhones and iPad Pro's.

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    GeertB
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