Thursday 30 January 2014

US Army camouflage (UCP) simply doesn't work

© Thimbleweed - Creative Commons.
Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) had been hailed as a wonder solution to the age old camo problem of how to make camouflage work across all terrain. Typically countries issue different camouflage for different theatres: desert, snow, countryside or urban. So when the computer designed UCP claimed to work in all theatres it seemed a BINGO! moment.

With one small problem: it didn't work (ref here and here).

Check out the following article which outlines the problem and the history of camouflage very nicely:

"All digital camo has two layers: a micropattern (the pixels) and a macropattern (the shapes the pixels form). If the scale of the macro blobs is too small—as they are with UCP—it triggers an optical phenomenon called "isoluminance," rendering the carefully-constructed camo pattern into a light-colored mass. In other words, it makes it incredibly easy to spot targets from a distance. That was one of the biggest problems with UCP"

1 comment:

  1. Hello. That is not what isoluminance means. isoluminance is the perceptual borderland where you CANT tell where an object is. if the camo didn't work it would be because it failed at achieving an isoluminant state not because of it.

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