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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 th

• jcranmer 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • yencabulator 4y ago
    The following text seems to be mostly talking about things that have nothing to do with square pixels, it just sounds like that's what was how the dude programmed his generating algorithm. To the best of my reading, the goals he achieved with the patterns don't interact with the squareness.
• danielvf 4y ago
  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. 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 https://www.hyperstealth.com/US4CES-ALPHA/index.html
  • Sharlin 4y ago
    Exactly. Very very few things in nature actually are made of large blobs of a single color (unless you're very shortsighted). Honestly, it baffles me why militaries didn't realize this earlier.
    • bityard 4y ago
      Source: former military member. In combat, camouflage is really the VERY last line of defense possible, and a fairly weak one at that. If the difference between staying alive and being dead is the pattern of your clothing, a lot of things have already gone seriously wrong and your chances of survival are not great. In the grand scheme of things, camo relatively high-hanging fruit. Money and time have mostly been spent on building superior weapons, armor, and of course training. Camo is a very small optimization in comparison and when the Army and Air Force decided to change up their BDU patterns, it was viewed by me and my fellow service members as largely a public image stunt. ("Look everyone, we're modern!") Edit: to be clear, I'm only referring to uniforms... snipers and such use camouflage netting for example that is tailored to their exact location and can be extremely effective at "hiding in plain sight."
      • jollybean 4y ago
        In the first phase of Ukrainian war soldiers were firing a lot of line of sight, it does matter. And especially the IR / night vision opportunities are real. It's very 'low hanging fruit'. It's ridiculous that that a 20 Trillion dollar Army has 'camouflage' that is very clearly crap next to better camo. These tests could have literally been run in a day, even back in the 1950s. Some soldiers, some screens, a few cameras, some changes in lighting and it would have been evident. Moreover, it's reasonable to be suspect in whether an organization that can't handle such a basic R&D task is going to be able to handle the more complicated things.
        • lupire 4y ago
          What camouflage is going to work anywhere where you are traveling miles per day to conquer territory, usually in cities?
• retSava 4y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Infantry_Brigade#/media/File:British_Chieftain_tanks.JPEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Infantry_Brigade#/media...
  • _petronius 4y ago
    Maybe it is related to dazzle camoflauge used on ships? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage There the goal is less to avoid detection and more to make it hard to determine direction/orientation.
    • jabl 4y ago
      My guess would be that the thinking behind it was that in urban environments you have more straight vertical/horizontal lines (houses, roads etc.) and thus wavy camouflage patterns would stand out more from the background.
    • rtkwe 4y ago
      Dazzle camo wasn't so much a "hide me" camo as it was a "hide data needed to shot me" camo. It was designed to make it harder to estimate heading and speed so it was harder to calculate accurate shots by submarines and naval guns which needed data about the target ship's speed, distance and heading to calculate an accurate shot.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Radar killed dazzle.
        • rtkwe 4y ago
          It's definitely the final nail in it's widespread use but it was used somewhat up to the end of WW2 though that focused on anti-kamikaze painting in the Pacific theater. Japan was several years behind the rest of the world on radar so it stuck around longer in the Pacific too before that transition to anti-kamikaze but even there by the end of the war Japan was using radar fire-control.
• ryanmercer 4y ago
  >Why did they try them in the first place? 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-suit-set-BCP-1152224512_1.webp https://static5.gunfire.com/eng_pl_Ghillie-Suit-camouflage-s...
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    Well, that ghillie suit doesn't look pixelated to me - it just looks like it has quite a few straight-sided polygons in it. Actually, that's what's bugging me most about this camo made from regular square blocks: it looks really easy for a recogniser to spot. No AI <spit>, an old-fashioned neural network would be enough to recognise edges, and then spot squares on a grid. [Edit] Yeah, I get that your average stag deer doesn't have access to thermal imaging and neural networks. But this is military camo, not deerstalking camo.
    • ryanmercer 4y ago
      >[Edit] Yeah, I get that your average stag deer doesn't have access to thermal imaging and neural networks. But this is military camo, not deerstalking camo. The average grunt doesn't have access to thermal imaging or neural networks either, they might have a crappy Vietnam-era flashlight, their weapon system, and a reasonable compromise between number of rounds and weight as spare mags. Especially when that grunt is a "third world" fighter. Pixelated camo like ARPAT saw the bulk of its current use in Afghanistan and Iraq where the most sophisticated thing the enemy might have is a pair of binoculars and a cellphone. The pixilation, to the human eye, is much more natural than large splotches of a few colors because terrain/vegetation/buildings in natural light have all sorts of depth and shadow variation, the pixilation is much harder to pick out than fairly large blotches of random color.
• muro 4y ago
  Shining under different light (e.g. IR) is nothing new. I think it was Soviet paint on tanks that was highly visible early in WW2 through a filter.
• adolph 4y ago
  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! https://guide.sportsmansguide.com/gulf-war-desert-night-camouflage/ https://guide.sportsmansguide.com/gulf-war-desert-night-camo...
• guessbest 4y ago
  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. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/04/23/the-navy-is-ready-to-dump-the-military-s-most-pointless-uniform/ https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/04/23/the-navy...
  • ARandomerDude 4y ago
    Much of this is service pride, politics, and recruiting. If the other services switch and you don't, your service looks dated, boring, and irrelevant. Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns.
    • russellbeattie 4y ago
      > Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns. A more terrifying sentence than this has rarely been written.
      • imwillofficial 4y ago
        The table stakes are uniforms here, lets not blow it out of proportion.
        • kragen 4y ago
          Until the Javascript cool kids invade your country because the USans elected a guy with a family grudge against your president. Then the Javascript cool kids decide whether to blow you into assorted body parts and pink mist in front of your parents because you tried to help a wounded child.
          • imwillofficial 4y ago
• hinkley 4y ago
  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.
  • bluGill 4y ago
    Very real issue. My uncle used to be a big hunter (he died a couple years ago), and could never see other hunters wearing the required blaze orange, but when they were wearing camouflage he had no problem seeing them in the woods. I have lots of other stories about the wierd things color blind people see and don't see. (My sisters are color blind, none of my family sees colors exactly the same, makes for some weird situations)
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Funny, considering most game animals are color-blind.
      • yencabulator 4y ago
        Survivorship bias perhaps, on the vest products (not the animals). Only the blaze orange vests that don't trigger the animals get commercial success; word will get around what the "good hunting products" are. Probably works by having the vest be similar brightness as the camo, once you combine the reds and greens.
  • evan_ 4y ago
    This was used in Vietnam. My neighbor growing up had this condition and was a spotter in Vietnam. He'd be flown over areas of jungle in a helicopter and he would be able to easily spot camouflaged structures. He would then photograph them and mark up what he saw. He parlayed this experience into a successful career in photojournalism after he got out of the military.
  • 4y ago
• kodah 4y ago
  MARPAT is a very well documented case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPAT 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.
• somerandomqaguy 4y ago
  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.
  • mikechalmers 4y ago
    > 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. This is a (kinda funny) plotline in Generation Kill.
  • fartcannon 4y ago
    What was worse, CADPAT or UCP? I couldn't find it in the article. Instinct is that CADPAT was worse, but UCP was just that style without the contrast thus negating one of it's features (disrupting the human shape with high contrast).
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Pattern is only one small factor. It's usually taken to be "Surface" in the list: - Shape - Shine - Shadow - Speed - Surface - Silhouette - Spacing - Smell - Sound
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  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.