I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work?
I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
It's not really so much about the pixels being square as the fractal-ish nature of mordern pixel camos that result in a "scale invariance" effect. There's details and contrast at the level of the small pixels, and there's details and contrasts are medium levels, and then again at large levels. Previous US army camo mostly had detail at only one scale level.
CADPAT works terrifyingly well in the temperate forests of Canada during spring/summer. I had a chance to go try and to spot people wearing CADPAT in the early 2000's and it was a royal pain to try and see them compared to the olive drab or even the US woodland patterns.
Just a fun aside: when Canada invaded Afghanistan, there was a lack of the arid variant of CADPAT. It left soldiers to land in the brown and tan desert wearing vivid green camouflage designed for summer in the Canadian rain forests.
>I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
It was fixed AFAIK. IIRC issued CADPAT clothing were controlled items in 2000's because they had the the treatments designed to work against near infrared. Civilian CADPAT lacked those treatments so companies like Tru Spec[1] could sell it on the open market. There were other teething issues I am aware of; the dyes bleeding into splotches instead of the digital pattern as called for, as well as fading issues after laundering. Fixed of course but it took some iterations.
[1] I just double checked, Tru Spec never sold it. There were some smaller outfits in Canada that produced CADPAT available on the civilian market for short time; Drop Zone Tactical out of Edmonton for sure was one. Rumor mill is that it was material made by Consoltex under military contract that failed to meet the military's specifications and sold off to licensed DND manufactures to recoup costs.
During the I-for-get-which war, the army hired color-blind spotters because the enemy camo turned out to be fooling fully sighted people but was less effective with red-green color blindness. I don't recall if it was texture or contrast issues but they stood out against the trees and shrubbery enough to locate.
So we not only have to worry about invisible spectra, but some filters on visible light may reveal the target as well.
The answers to your first paragraph is in another part of the series:
> Now we can address the Micropattern - digital pixels. These are required to add background noise and texture matching with the background and this is designed to fool with the focal area of the eye - when you are looking directly at or close to the target to make it more difficult to recognize what you are looking at.
I personally find the who camouflage switch to every branch of service, including the navy to be bizarre. Who thought it was good idea for navy seamen to be camouflaged in the water? With that line of reasoning why didn't the airforce get their own camouflage to look like a flight line? hah
> After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag.
In development since 1983, the camo saw no use in the field until it was deployed during the first Gulf War (1990-1991).
The purpose was to disrupt primitive Soviet-era night vision. The grid pattern was intended to interfere with the generated grid used by these devices for targeting.
Even after plenty of research I could find no cases of this pattern ever disrupting anything. By the early 90’s, night vision technology had progressed greatly and this green grid was completely ineffective. There is even some anecdotal evidence it made detection easier!
An interesting macro-variant is the Berlin brigade tank camo pattern, which is surprisingly cool! No idea where that comes into uniform camo pattern history nor how efficient it is, but who cares. It's cool beans.
With no knowledge what so ever my gut reaction is to simply point to nature. Leaves get eaten/bitten/broken/ripped, a branch might be in front of another adding depth with similar patterns, rocks and sand in a desert can vary sharply at different focal depths, urban environments can have dozens of materials in use along with random detritus and objects at various focal depths.
MARPAT is a very well documented case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPAT In its case, it was chosen because the blocks actually blend very well into environments when viewed from a distance.
I doubt they have to be pixelated. They have a higher resolution than the other patterns which introduces more noise, which is probably good. But I would guess that smooth patterns would work too. It just doesn't matter since it would look the same from longer distances.
If I'm reading this correctly, the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern. So let's pick one color from the best camo patterns in every environment [the only one that has good NIR performance], and the result will somehow work well!" Which is... yowzers.
(For what it's worth, the Multicam pattern, which is slightly modified to the OCP pattern now in use by the US Army/Air Force, manages to do a better job than the UCP pattern at actually being universal camo, and it's not even the best of the tests.)
The NIR requirements means you can almost see how the decision might be justifiable... but that no one actually tested the resulting pattern as a check? I mean, one of the most salient facts about human color processing is that we evaluate colors based on their surrounding context, so even if individual colors work well, you would need to check their performance in their context to make sure they still work well.
There is an argument out there that the UCP camo patterns were more to make US troops distinct from enemy forces and reduce friendly fire than to provide any advantage for camouflage purposes. That it made American troops extremely identifiable by the distinct look of UCP.
I don't know if I believe it, but it makes a little sense. What would have made more sense is if they had allowed tinting it to different colors based on the region. There is an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WckhOUMfHk
I'm in the Air force, and while not relevant to actual camouflage ability, I can personally say that OCPs look much nicer than the uniforms before. A lot of the old camo patterns looked painfully ugly. And the ability to camouflage isn't too relevant for me anyways, unless I'm trying to blend into chairs/desks.
> the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP
> pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern
Just wait until you read how the F-35 was procured. "We want one airplane for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Oh, and it had to include parts from almost all NATO allies, even those who we won't sell it to."
One thing I was surprised to learn about NIR requirements is that it apparently doesn't just mean "dark". I have some coyote brown NIR compliant gear (water carriers etc) and under NIR it has the same shade as grass (which is quite bright, relatively speaking).
Arguably the most famous golf course architect, Dr. Alister MacKenzie (Augusta National, Cypress Point, Pasatiempo, etc), was a civilian physician in WWI and became interested in camouflage design during the war. He made significant contributions to the British military camouflage during his tenure. He later based his golf course architecture, primarily the bunkering, from camouflage design principals he had learned.
Snipers are supposed to augment their camo with local materials, even in the woods. Non-sniper camo is a bit different, you wouldn't want to run across the street in that.
I really wish Chrome for Android had a menu option for "Show Simplified View", rather than just guessing. Some of the worst sites won't trigger it, presumably because the HTML is so simple the algorithm assumes you don't need it.
Now I want to show up at our Zoom meetings in full camo. Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.
Plus then you could convince a few of your coworkers to show up in camo with you and make your manager nervous you’re about to do a hostile takeover of the company.
I go for the classic 'Big Blue' look and wear a suit and tie. Helps me to mentally separate work and relaxation time, with the added benefit of getting better treatment from management.
> Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.
Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.
An interesting evolution in the camouflage meta is the proliferation of inexpensive thermal cameras. Chinese companies like Infiray are producing reasonably-priced thermal monoculars that defeat all colour-based camo. Low-spec monos and COTI-style devices start around $2k and high-spec (around 720p 50Hz) for around $5k, same price as a nice omni VIII NVG mono.
Question (from somebody who only skimmed the article): how much variance exists of that fabric? Is that pattern repeated after x meters if fabric?
If so: wouldn't knowing what to look for greatly increase the ability to automatically extract the pattern from image data?
(Like how it is possible to extract signals from below the noise floor in LoRa communication?)
Camouflage for high value assets is rapidly becoming a point of focus.
The Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020 and the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 have both displayed the growing need to prioritise sensor camouflage.
The contemporary peer on peer battlefield runs 24/7, but humans require periodic quality rest.
The two most recent peer on peer conflicts display how stopping and harbouring up makes you an easier fixed target.
The conundrum of the modern battlefield is that if you stop, you die. But if you don’t stop, you face rapid cognitive decline and die.
Sensor camouflage could be an insurance policy that meets or exceeds minimum rest and recovery needs of soldiers as well as improving expensive asset survivability in a world looking increasingly like “SCUD the Disposable Assassin” where loitering munitions are getting cheap enough to target individual combatants.
Makes me think of active camflague like a cloaking device, probably not practical for military, but give 360 camera, processing and miniaturization technology advancement how hard would it be to make a see through car for instance
There's a system named ADAPTIV [1] which is essentially a bunch of tiles that can alter their temperature to make a tank look like a civilian car on the infrared band.
Random but does anyone know where to buy a official Crye precision multicam texture for game dev? Their website gives the impression they just sell fabrics to the US market
That'd probably be rather hard since the texture is exactly where the profit is. For a game you don't need an exact 100% match, just something that looks right. I'd go looking for stock photos of people in the cammo, and then collaging a bunch of it together using GIMPs resynthesizer plugin. That should get it to look right without it being the exact pattern.
Anyone reading should check out the links at the bottom: the nightvision images in particular really highlight the issue with having poor NIR performance.
I wore this pattern during my time in the service. It sucked and did not blend into anything but wet gravel. It sucked so much that when it came time to deploy overseas, troops were issued Multicam uniforms to better blend with the elements.
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
[+] [-] danielvf|3 years ago|reply
As jcranmer says, there's more details on the reasons it works somewhere down in this page, https://www.hyperstealth.com/US4CES-ALPHA/index.html
[+] [-] somerandomqaguy|3 years ago|reply
Just a fun aside: when Canada invaded Afghanistan, there was a lack of the arid variant of CADPAT. It left soldiers to land in the brown and tan desert wearing vivid green camouflage designed for summer in the Canadian rain forests.
>I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
It was fixed AFAIK. IIRC issued CADPAT clothing were controlled items in 2000's because they had the the treatments designed to work against near infrared. Civilian CADPAT lacked those treatments so companies like Tru Spec[1] could sell it on the open market. There were other teething issues I am aware of; the dyes bleeding into splotches instead of the digital pattern as called for, as well as fading issues after laundering. Fixed of course but it took some iterations.
[1] I just double checked, Tru Spec never sold it. There were some smaller outfits in Canada that produced CADPAT available on the civilian market for short time; Drop Zone Tactical out of Edmonton for sure was one. Rumor mill is that it was material made by Consoltex under military contract that failed to meet the military's specifications and sold off to licensed DND manufactures to recoup costs.
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
So we not only have to worry about invisible spectra, but some filters on visible light may reveal the target as well.
[+] [-] jcranmer|3 years ago|reply
> Now we can address the Micropattern - digital pixels. These are required to add background noise and texture matching with the background and this is designed to fool with the focal area of the eye - when you are looking directly at or close to the target to make it more difficult to recognize what you are looking at.
[+] [-] guessbest|3 years ago|reply
> After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/04/23/the-navy...
[+] [-] adolph|3 years ago|reply
The purpose was to disrupt primitive Soviet-era night vision. The grid pattern was intended to interfere with the generated grid used by these devices for targeting.
Even after plenty of research I could find no cases of this pattern ever disrupting anything. By the early 90’s, night vision technology had progressed greatly and this green grid was completely ineffective. There is even some anecdotal evidence it made detection easier!
https://guide.sportsmansguide.com/gulf-war-desert-night-camo...
[+] [-] retSava|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Infantry_Brigade#/media...
[+] [-] ryanmercer|3 years ago|reply
With no knowledge what so ever my gut reaction is to simply point to nature. Leaves get eaten/bitten/broken/ripped, a branch might be in front of another adding depth with similar patterns, rocks and sand in a desert can vary sharply at different focal depths, urban environments can have dozens of materials in use along with random detritus and objects at various focal depths.
Pixilation was probably a logical step towards recreating these varied environments. Look at a ghillie suit that has leaves incorporated, they'll have a pixilated appearance - example: https://static5.gunfire.com/eng_pl_Ghillie-Suit-camouflage-s...
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
- Shape
- Shine
- Shadow
- Speed
- Surface
- Silhouette
- Spacing
- Smell
- Sound
[+] [-] jcranmer|3 years ago|reply
(For what it's worth, the Multicam pattern, which is slightly modified to the OCP pattern now in use by the US Army/Air Force, manages to do a better job than the UCP pattern at actually being universal camo, and it's not even the best of the tests.)
The NIR requirements means you can almost see how the decision might be justifiable... but that no one actually tested the resulting pattern as a check? I mean, one of the most salient facts about human color processing is that we evaluate colors based on their surrounding context, so even if individual colors work well, you would need to check their performance in their context to make sure they still work well.
[+] [-] foxyv|3 years ago|reply
I don't know if I believe it, but it makes a little sense. What would have made more sense is if they had allowed tinting it to different colors based on the region. There is an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WckhOUMfHk
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autokad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasebank|3 years ago|reply
Arguably the most famous golf course architect, Dr. Alister MacKenzie (Augusta National, Cypress Point, Pasatiempo, etc), was a civilian physician in WWI and became interested in camouflage design during the war. He made significant contributions to the British military camouflage during his tenure. He later based his golf course architecture, primarily the bunkering, from camouflage design principals he had learned.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alister_MacKenzie
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
That would be whoever benefitted financially from the decision to fuck our soldiers over.
[+] [-] 323|3 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/hhQDS9c.jpeg
[+] [-] yencabulator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] battery_glasses|3 years ago|reply
document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(elm => elm.style.width = "93vw")
[+] [-] russellbeattie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mNovak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|3 years ago|reply
Plus then you could convince a few of your coworkers to show up in camo with you and make your manager nervous you’re about to do a hostile takeover of the company.
[+] [-] cobertos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biofox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corrral|3 years ago|reply
Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.
[+] [-] shard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffrallen|3 years ago|reply
Arrrrgh.
[+] [-] wyager|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fho|3 years ago|reply
If so: wouldn't knowing what to look for greatly increase the ability to automatically extract the pattern from image data? (Like how it is possible to extract signals from below the noise floor in LoRa communication?)
[+] [-] fho|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
Now I imagine uniform fabric with adversarial patterns added, for those.
[+] [-] woevdbz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriselles|3 years ago|reply
The Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020 and the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 have both displayed the growing need to prioritise sensor camouflage.
The contemporary peer on peer battlefield runs 24/7, but humans require periodic quality rest.
The two most recent peer on peer conflicts display how stopping and harbouring up makes you an easier fixed target.
The conundrum of the modern battlefield is that if you stop, you die. But if you don’t stop, you face rapid cognitive decline and die.
Sensor camouflage could be an insurance policy that meets or exceeds minimum rest and recovery needs of soldiers as well as improving expensive asset survivability in a world looking increasingly like “SCUD the Disposable Assassin” where loitering munitions are getting cheap enough to target individual combatants.
[+] [-] JoelMcCracken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rastonbury|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cxcorp|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.baesystems.com/en/feature/adativ-cloak-of-invisi...
[+] [-] bloqs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Doxin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabl|3 years ago|reply
tl;dr: gray is a good camouflage color against clouds or haze, which is a fairly common background for aircraft operating at mid to high altitudes.
(The logic is fairly similar to what results in Navy ships being painted haze gray and not azure blue or whatever color the ocean happens to be today)
[+] [-] 72736379|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] some_random|3 years ago|reply