During WW1 several ships were camouflaged using a technique called Dazzle to confuse and deceive enemy submarines as to the orientation of their target vessels. In a mark of the ever inventive British, this was known as Razzle Dazzle.
This worked very well apparently, so well in fact that the process has been recently deployed again. I am proposing that this technique is greatly enhanced by the use of Gabor Patterns as a type of camouflage.
For anyone not knowing what these are, it’s best to look up the links then imagine trying to focus on something, within possibly only a few seconds, that is in motion and displaying a Gabor Pattern as a form of camouflage.
see links to fully understand-- xenzag, Jul 31 2021 Razzle Dazzle https://www.smithso...m-dazzle-180958657/ [xenzag, Jul 31 2021] Gabor Patterns https://www.syfy.co...is-circle-illusion? [xenzag, Jul 31 2021] Extensions to get rid of those pesky straight edges https://www.google....36&bih=750&dpr=1.25Disguise the shape of the ship as well as the pattern. [AusCan531, Aug 03 2021] I can't see why static zebra stripes would be better than Razzle. And if you can make the appearance change there are more effective ways to actively camouflage.-- Voice, Aug 01 2021 They're another step up re creation of visual confusion. Have you looked at them? Circles become squares. Parallel lines are not parallel etc.-- xenzag, Aug 01 2021 The reason dazzle camouflage became obsolete was the increasing use radar, to which it offers no defence. I can't see how gaborflage would differ in that respect.-- Loris, Aug 01 2021 It's not meant to defeat radar which also cannot be used in many scenarios. Visual camouflage is still widely deployed and Gabor patterns extend the possibilities of confusion and deception regarding the use of scopes and optical focusing devices.-- xenzag, Aug 01 2021 I wonder whether there's a version that can confuse automated image recognition via radar and thermal.-- Voice, Aug 01 2021 Because it can be hard to judge distance at sea, I came up with a different form of camouflage: paint your enormous battleship to look like one guy in a little dinghy, fishing. Also, this idea is awesome. Those Gabor illusions break my brain.-- neutrinos_shadow, Aug 01 2021 Zsa zsa, is that you?-- pertinax, Aug 01 2021 ^ No, it's Eva, Dahling.-- AusCan531, Aug 02 2021 Of course! (The stripes looked like zeds).-- pertinax, Aug 02 2021 [Voice} As a rule, automated image recognition isn't going to be fooled by a lot of things that trick our eye. Among other reasons, because we're both better and worse at taking in the entire image at once. (That is, our eyes can't capture the whole image at once like a camera can, so it makes a lot more assumptions in processing it).
As far as visual camouflage, I like this idea, but my concern is that it doesn't handle edges well. If you look at the header image of the syfy article, the illusion disappears once you no longer have full circles.-- MechE, Aug 02 2021 To address [MechE]'s concern about straight edges, it should be a trifle to change that with extensions [link] which change the regular shape into anything you like. Perhaps spring loaded nylon sheets which snap taut.-- AusCan531, Aug 03 2021 Alternatively, a battleship-sized inflatable bust of Gabe Newell, giving the impression of a giant computer programmer wading through chest-deep ocean. That'll cause confusion.-- sninctown, Aug 03 2021 I first read this as "Garbaflage" e.g. being camouflaged as city garbage. Now there's an idea.-- mailtosalonga, Aug 04 2021 [MechE] automated vision systems often also break an image apart for the purposes of parallel processing. And such a system could be vulnerable to difficulties humans don't face due to humans' vastly superior tertiary processing of the image. A contemporary image recognition system is severely limited by the images it was trained on. It has no imagination, no awareness of the item it's looking at, and very little cross-association. For example if you make a modern war-ship of a wholly new shape but with individual parts about where they're supposed to be by function and shaped about how they should be by function a human gunnery officer could suss out what it is and even some of its capabilities. The officer would certainly recognize it as a warship, and probably identify its primary and secondary functions. An image recognition system would throw up its digital hands and release the magic smoke. Or take a thermal image of a known warship, but overlayed with insulation on certain parts, heat emitters on others, and heat spreaders on still others. A human could figure out what had happened. An automated image recognition system might gleefully report, "There is a piece of a dock floating in the water. 95% confidence"-- Voice, Aug 04 2021 random, halfbakery