F - 16 Camouflage Development Study Final Report

The focus of this research project was the development of a procedure by which various alternative camouflage schemes could be developed, and once developed, evaluated. Our approach was to delineate principles of camouflage, for concealment and for deception. Once these principles were uncovered, various combinations of independent variables, each developed from a particular principle were then used in the development of three related deception camouflage patterns. In Experiment 1 these patterns were evaluated in terms of time to judge direction of an aircraft and accuracy of this judgment. In Experiment 2 the time to identify the presence of camouflage was measured. In both experiments evaluation was in terms of a worse-case scenario with the best camouflage pattern resulting in the poorest performance, i.e. slowest response time and poorest accuracy, as well as highest response variability. 2