Cuttlefish

Good morning all. New visitor, first time poster to your forum.

I am a scientist from the UK and I was hoping that you might be able to help me answer a question. Please forgive me if this question is stupid but your help is greatly appreciated.

Imagine a situation where you could take photos of a particular hunting area and instantly design a perfect camouflage pattern match and have it applied to your favourite brand of clothing...

Is that something that appeals? Assuming that the camouflage was really good and cost was not a consideration...at what scale would you like to be able to personalise it? Large geographic area such as US Northeast, Local habitat such as a particular woodland or even a specific tree or bush? What about particular seasons?

Thanks

Nomercy448

Here's the problem with what you've proposed, and the difference in what REAL camo companies do, versus what you're trying to accomplish...

You take a picture, and it becomes a 2 dimensional composite of the 3 dimensional world in which we hunt. You now apply that wrapped around a 3 dimensional body, and you might as well have wrapped us in a cardboard box.

Modern camo patterns have intermittent shadows and psuedo-dimensional contrast to create the illusion of 3 dimensions and break up the outline of the human form.

So no, I wouldn't be interested in buying an inferior "custom" camouflage product.

I noticed that one of your poll responses is centered around different prey types - and frankly, I'd consider anything in this line to be pure hokum. We don't know enough about the visual acuity, color and depth perceptions, or the ability of the animal brain (talking about multiple animals here) to process and compile viewed objects into "visual" images.

Plus, I hunt the same territory within the same season for different game. If I have the option to have ONE set of camo that blends into the terrain and fools ALL animals, why would I spend double or triple the cost on multiple sets to blend into the terrain and fool one specific species at a time?

cjclemens

It was always my understanding that deer, in particular, weren't the greatest at distinguishing colors anyway. All you really need is something to break up your outline a bit. If you look at the direction camo patterns are going, you'd see that they're starting to break away from the photo-realistic patterns that have been so popular in years past. For what it's worth, I use military surplus woodland and tiger stripe patterns and I still do just fine.

alleyyooper

Biggest problem I have is NO CAMO I have ever found on todays market is for those of us who hunt in Pine plantations and cedar swamps. While the real tree hard woods camo seems to work it doesn't blend in with the cedars and pine trees well.
I haven't seen any change wearing camo or blaze orange with the deer and coyotes I hunt. Is just people in my experience that are seeing the blaze orange.

And money is a problem for just about every one. I live on a fixed income and so do many of my friends. Kids have kids or their own to cloth and feed then hopefully have money for advanced schooling after high school.


Al

Game Stalker

From my POV, there's plenty of good camo already on the market. I can always find or create the means to blend in w/the environment regardless of the game I hunt. Considering this and what some others have said, the next or real most important thing is being quiet and remaining motionless.

Oldtimr

Actually, there is now camo clothing made for the military the parfectly blends in no matter where you are. The way I understand it is there are thousands of tiny cameras imbedded in the cloth and the ones in the front project what is in front of you on your back side and the ones on your back, project what is behind you on your front, making you just about invisible. I doubt many of us would be able to afford that stuff.

Cuttlefish

Hello all and many thanks for your responses. It's possible that I wasn't very clear in my original post...

When I say "take a photo and produce perfect camouflage" I definitely do not mean printing the photo or even a photo-realistic representation. I mean produce a camouflage pattern (think woodland DPM or Multicam) that is the best statistical match for the background.

Interesting that you mention motion because the patterns that I have seen a lot of hunters use (real tree and mossy oak, for example) introduce really bad motion cues due to their photo-realistic nature. This is precisely why the military will not touch any camouflage that has representations of environment within it. Motion is the primary method of breaking camouflage so any camouflage pattern needs to actively reduce these cues as far as possible to zero.

I am not here to sell anything (I have nothing to sell), but I do have an algorithm that I have written that produces camouflage patterns from photos. I am just trying to figure out if it might be of interest to hunters.

Perhaps the best thing would be for me to demonstrate it so that you can give me your opinion. If you upload a photo of a background against which you would like to be camouflaged I will put it through the algorithm and post back the output pattern. Then you can tell me what you think...?

Cuttlefish

I would have to disagree with your premise that we don't know enough about animal vision to produce camouflage effective against them.

The vertebrate visual system is well understood and differences between animals are usually confined to differences in spectral sensitivity and maybe polarisation sensitivity in birds and fish. The actual hardware sitting behind the eye is much of a muchness.

In general, camouflage that works really well against humans will work against most mammals because we have greater visual acuity and broader spectral sensitivity. Birds, however, have broader spectral sensitivity and better colour discrimination and so we need to be careful generalising about pattern effectiveness. That said, camouflage is seldom broken through colour contrast because motion and luminance contrast are much greater cues. Only in the situation in which you are motionless, and perfectly matched in brightness against your background should you start to worry about colour.

The answer is probably to make camouflage that works against turkeys which have excellent ultraviolet vision and decent spectral discrimination up into the green/yellow portion of the spectrum (same as us humans). Almost every other species has "worse" vision so good bird camouflage will be good against humans and deer etc.

One additional thought is that anyone who hunts birds should probably make sure they don't wash their clothes using detergents containing brightening agents as these usually contain a lot of UV pigments and any camouflage pattern will be rendered useless as you will look very bright to the animal you are hunting. Whilst deer cannot "see" ultraviolet but they are sensitive to it in a way that humans are not (unless you have had a cataract lens replacement as some of the polymers used are UV transparent).

Sorry, I'm rambling now and I'm sure that I'm not saying anything that you you don't already know.

Cuttlefish

Yes I think that moving away from photo-realistic patterns is the way to go. Multicam is the best pattern that I have seen but it is an average across so many different backgrounds that it is necessarily always a compromise. If you hunt primarily in high contrast deciduous woodland you are almost always better off wearing classic British woodland DPM

Cuttlefish

Have you looked at any of the Scandinavian camouflage? Norway and Sweden both use camouflage patterns that would probably work quite well.