Why Camouflage?
From Army Technical Bulletin TB 43-0147: “All military vehicles and equipment have characteristic shapes and interior shadows. These so-called signatures contrast with natural surroundings and make the object conspicuous. Pattern painting does much to break up the signature characteristics by using lusterless paint to reduce the glare of headlights, color to reduce contrasts with the soil and vegetation, and pattern shape, size, and placement to distort the vehicle’s form. The paint also reflects near infrared radiation. The patterns, designed for each type of vehicle, have color areas that cut off corners; avoid straight, vertical, and horizontal lines; and extend internal shadows in shapes similar to natural features and vegetation.”
Fractal Camouflage Patterns
Numerous mathematical techniques have been developed to generate camouflage patterns based on real-world scene imagery. Features of scene imagery such as color content, spatial texture, gray-level statistics, pixel correlation and spatial frequency content can all be used to construct artificial images that closely match in one or more respects the input scenery. One such method is based on fractional-dimensioned shapes, or fractals. This page contains examples of fractal camouflage patterns derived from photographic scene images using ARS algorithms.
Figure 1. Image from Everglades National Park (top) and resulting fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 2. Image from Acadia National Park (top) and resulting fractal camouflage pattern
Note: the blue tones in the pattern are from inclusion of a portion of the lake in the lower left corner of the input image.
Figure 3. Winter scene from Acadia National Park (left) and resulting fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 4. Summer scene from Acadia National Park (top) and resulting fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 5. Rocky beach from Acadia National Park and resulting fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 6. Mountain rocks and trees at Acadia National Park (top) and fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 7. Autumn scene # 1 at Acadia National Park (top) and fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 8. Autumn scene # 2 at Acadia National Park (top) and fractal camouflage pattern
Figure 9. Autumn ferns at Acadia National Park (left) and fractal camouflage pattern
