This paper reviews the achievements of Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), an American painter and naturalist whose pioneering writings on animal camouflage addressed shared concerns among artists, zoologists and military tacticians. It discusses his beliefs about camouflage (both natural and military) in the context of his training as an artist, with particular emphasis on three of his major ...

Abstract Camouflage is a widespread strategy to increase survival. The cryptic plumage colouration of precocial chicks improves camouflage often through disruptive colouration. Here, we examine whether and how fringed neoptile feathers conceal the outline chicks. We first conducted digital experiment test two potential mechanisms for concealment appendages: (1) reduction edge intensity (2) lumi...

Camouflage is exceptionally challenging in pelagic environments because of their featureless nature. Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that pelagic species have evolved highly sophisticated cryptic strategies, three of which-transparency, mirrors, and counter illumination-are rare or absent in other habitats. Pelagic visual systems are equally complex, and several visual capabilities, including U...

Camouflage is frequently used in the animal kingdom in order to conceal oneself from visual detection or surveillance. Many camouflage techniques are based on masking the familiar contours and texture of the subject by superposition of multiple edges on top of it. This work presents an operator, D arg, for the detection of three-dimensional smooth convex (or, equivalently, concave) objects. It ...

Cuttlefish are cephalopod molluscs that achieve dynamic camouflage by rapidly extracting visual information from the background and neurally implementing an appropriate skin (or body) pattern. We investigated how cuttlefish body patterning responses are influenced by contrast and spatial scale by varying the contrast and the size of checkerboard backgrounds. We found that: (1) at high contrast ...

We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the environment and self-organize into an appropriate pattern. Current artificial camouflage systems are either limited to static patterns, which are adapted for ...

Our overall goal is to understand the perceptual and mechanistic principles that underlay camouflage framed in the context of the animals’ environment. In particular, we hope to characterize and understand the perceptual abilities of several species of benthic and pelagic cephalopods, the aspects of their optical environment that affect their camouflage behavior, the characterization of that be...

Sensor Networks are an emerging technology with a substantial potential to reshape the landscape in a myriad of areas. As with all technologies that involve information a significant effort has to be made in order to guarantee security. In case of sensor networks a special problem, the Node Capture Problem, is considered to be one of the most challenging ones, where particularly the aspect of t...

Camouflage is perhaps the most widespread anti-predator strategy in nature, found in numerous animal groups. A long-standing prediction is that individuals should have camouflage tuned to the visual backgrounds where they live. However, while several studies have demonstrated phenotype-environment associations, few have directly shown that this confers an improvement in camouflage, particularly...

One of the oldest theories of animal camouflage predicts that apparently conspicuous markings enhance concealment. Such 'distraction' marks are hypothesized to work by drawing the viewer's attention away from salient features, such as the body outline, that would otherwise reveal the animal. If distraction marks enhance concealment, then they offer a route for animals to combine camouflage mark...