Optimal camouflage colors determination using spectral reflectance of real‐scene objects

Abstract

Color selection for a camouflage pattern is a substantial part in designing an effective camouflage pattern. Current color selection methods are often based on the prevailing colors of digital images captured from a scene. However, color extraction from digital images has shown a major difference between the pattern color and the real environment colors. In this article, we present a more precise approach to camouflage color selection based on the spectrophotometric data of dominant objects in a scene. To this end, the dominant objects of a grassland scene were identified. The spectral reflectance of the dominant objects was measured and the percentage of each of them occurred in the scene was estimated. Then, the chromatic values of dominant objects were inserted into an existing camouflage pattern based on the occurrence of each dominant object in the scene. The performance of the obtained colors was assessed by calculating the color difference between the printed camouflage pattern and the dominant objects of the scene. The results showed that using a portable spectrophotometer instead of using a digital camera is more accurate for camouflage color selection and reduces the color difference from the surrounding environment. Furthermore, our method guarantees the absolute similarity between camouflage colors and terrain colors without using camouflage evaluation indexes or photo‐simulation assessment.

Implementation of Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) Clustering Based Camouflage Image Generation Algorithm

“…A traditional method is histogram quantification, which cannot distinguish pixels with the same brightness and different colors [1]. An approach proposed recently is spectral reflectance of real-scene objects [2], the deviation of colors information was eliminated, but complex calculation made the extraction of dominant colors for background image extremely difficult. Another method to extract the domain colors of the background is recursive overlapping of pattern templates, which can accurately extract the main colors of background image, but this algorithm is not widely used in different conditions [3].…”