

New fighter jet camouflage schemes - tony_le_montana
http://markosun.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/new-fighter-jet-camouflage-schemes/

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cabirum
Does camouflage really helps in modern air combat? Aircrafts engage each other
mostly on beyond visual range distances, and dogfighting in kinda rare now.
Also, HUDs should assist in tracking of targets and highlight them, so camo
will make no difference. The only use for camo I can think of is to hide the
aircraft while it's stationed on the airstrip - in a relatively vulnerable
position.

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bdunbar
_dogfighting in kinda rare now._

This is true, now. In large part because the USAF dominates the air so
thoroughly that opposing air is toast the day the war starts.

This may not always be so.

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marvin
I don't have any information about the second Iraq war, but a relative of mine
works with radar systems. From what he told me, Iraq's air defense during the
first Gulf war was ridiculously poor - the Iraqi air defence forces just
turned on their air defense radars and waited to get a bomb dropped on top of
them.

Apparently, there was a NATO exercise in Norway a couple of years ago where
the US expected the same tactics to be used and hence to easily achieve air
superiority. However, the opposing force moved their radar and missile systems
around, used the terrain for cover, performed feinting maneuvers by giving the
impression that the air defense systems were located in different locations
and also obverved using mobile observers on the ground. Apparently, the US
lost the air battle spectacularly.

Imagine a military conflict with an enemy that doesn't follow conventional
doctrine like this. It's very hard to extrapolate from history how things are
going to play out. A large-scale war with today's technology is going to look
a lot different than the assymetric warfare the US currently seems to be
optimizing for.

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pclark
This has been played out in a huge war game in 2002 involving Lt General Paul
Van Riper and your assumptions are correct:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002>

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marvin
This is a very fascinating read. The exercise I mentioned probably took place
after the 2002 exercise you have linked to.

Without being too deeply informed on this subject, it seems to me like the US
military refuses to acknowledge the weaknesses of its doctrine in a large-
scale conflict against a sufficiently skilled and advanced adversary.

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sc00ter
But that's just a bunch of photos. Where's the article, and what's the science
behind these?

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hedgehog
Read these with a grain of salt but this guy provides some insight into the
design process for these patterns:

<http://www.hyperstealth.com/CADPAT-MARPAT.htm>

<http://www.hyperstealth.com/digital-design/index.htm>

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astrosi
This is a pretty old idea however not applied to aircraft, it was used on
ships in WW1 and WW2 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage>

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nosse
Zebras used it even before that. Practically all camouflage ideas can be found
from nature.

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ayu
Except they used it to deter bloodsucking insects.
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/120209-zebra-
st...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/120209-zebra-stripes-
horseflies-bugs-akesson-science/)

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nosse
How do you explain okapi and quagga? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quagga>

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dfc
Explain what?

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nosse
If stripes are for insects not biting, then how come some species have
developed only partial stripes? Would not make sense to get all the flies to
concentrate on your non striped body-parts... Against lions this makes perfect
sense as having striped backside makes the overall shape harder to grasp.

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dfc
Its not that I agree with the parent but did you read the linked article?

 _"The results may help explain why zebras' skinniest stripes are on their
faces and legs. "That's also the place where you have the thinnest skin," said
Åkesson, of Sweden's Lunds University."_

But as I stated up thread even if this research was definitive it does not
preclude the camouflage benefits...

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daniel-cussen
Looks a lot like razzle-dazzle, circa 1914.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage>

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rbanffy
Can't believe the title isn't "the rise of the 8-bit fighter"...

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bigiain
I wonder whether camouflage has changed in purpose (on fighter jets) and is no
longer about "fooling" the human visual system, but about fooling computer
vision.

I'd guess those "New Aesthetic" style pixelated camo paintjobs would do a
pretty good job of fooling OpenCV based classifiers…

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thwest
The purpose of the camo didn't have to change, the purpose of computer vision
has been to mimic the human visual system already. Both systems of perception
take pains to match the sensed scene against expected structure of objects in
the natural world (high contrast gradients at object boundaries, object flow).
Anything that can be made to have random structure will provide false cues to
edge and flow based perception. There is some evidence of the similarity of
the perception systems in projects like SSIM that correlate structure of
images under sparsifying transforms such as wavelets to human quality
measures.

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16s
See, security through obscurity has a purpose.

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Nrsolis
"Security through obscurity" has _ALWAYS_ had a purpose in the spectrum of
techniques used to defeat the enemy. The term is just misapplied in the
context of cryptographic systems to denote a system where the algorithm isn't
published. e.g. if the security of your cryptosystem depends on anything more
than just the security of the key, you're toast.

In NETSEC, we see tons of trojans/worms that try mightily to camouflage their
existence with innocent-looking control protocols hidden in normal looking
HTTP (or HTTPS) traffic and other things.

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nosse
I'd guess that fighter camouflage also makes fighters more harder to track
visually from satellites. This might not interest Americans, but for some air
forces it could be a factor?

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its_so_on
I'm curious why you say having fighters be harder to track visually from
satellites wouldn't interest Americans - youu say it like America has a
monopoly up there...

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nosse
I thought U.S. has practical monopoly up there. At least in military
surveillance satellites.

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nextstep
It's just a bunch of photos with captions. Why are those patterns picked for
camp? Does anyone know how this camouflage works?

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philjackson
I'm assuming camo. is more important for these planes when they're on the
ground than in the air?

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electromagnetic
Near ground too, I would say. Take off and landing is a relatively slow
process where they're highly vulnerable, especially the air-to-air fighters.

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hmottestad
Looks like the sort of pixelated image a satellite might provide?

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pbhjpbhj
So hiding the planes - or at least their model - when on the ground from high-
pass recon or satellite views, sounds most likely the primary reason for this
sort of design.

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maeon3
An better camouflage scheme would be to identify the general direction of the
aggressor, and take a photograph of the terrain (or sky) in the opposite
direction, then tint or color of the airplane with that background, so it
blends in.

If the computer could establish the exact location and direction and velocity
of the looker, it could make itself partially invisible by projecting to the
viewer the same colors that would have been projected had the plane not even
been there. With enough knowledge of the viewer, a scrolling image of the
background could be projected.

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tzaman
At the speed these aircrafts are moving, I doubt there would be significant
improvement over these camo solutions. Not to mention the price difference.

