Design and evaluation of (urban) camouflage

摘要

An international group consisting of several NATO nations participated in a trial in which urban camouflage was developed and compared. First, photographs were taken in and around a small town (arid climate). Next, the different groups derived urban camouflage patterns from these photographs. We applied our method for deriving a camouflage pattern from a set of (characteristic) background images to the imagery. Eleven different patterns were made into prototype camouflage suits. Panoramic images of all prototype suits were taken on 36 locations in the environment in which the background images were taken. We used these images in a search experiment with human observers for evaluating camouflage performance of the various patterns. The pattern we developed featured among the two best performing patterns, with good performance indicated by low chance of detection and long search times. The results show that our method for deriving a camouflage pattern from background imagery works well.