multiscam and marsplat pt. 2
tl;dr there’s a vaguely defensible reason why clone armour is white, and it’s because droid vision and image processing means that camouflage doesn’t work
Did a bit more research about this on the grounds that if I’d thought of it, the mil-industrial complex definitely had, and found that Los Alamos National Labs - where the nuclear bomb was developed - is already doing counter-camo using an oceanographic dataset from NOAA.
We’ve already developed an algorithmic framework for image segmentation and shape analysis based on geometric modeling of principles of perceptual organization. The goal of this work was to develop efficient automated methods for detecting and analyzing features in remote sensing imagery for national security and intelligence applications.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/02/outsmarting-the-art-of-camouflage/
I’d decided that - after something @wrennette said - that combat droid eyes are, by default, multispectral. A common B1 can see all the way through the human visible spectrum to far infrared and near ultraviolet. Giving them this range means that camouflage as we use it today wouldn't work, even ignoring the image processing issue as per my previous post. For example, the thermal difference between clones and the environment would be visible regardless of the patterns on their armour, like the picture below of four people in an empty parking lot.
Instead, you might focus on making sure no heat leaks through the soles of their boots, so that the droids can’t tell where they’re hiding, or track their ongoing movements via the fading heat prints on the ground. Maybe their backpacks vent heat into a diffuse plumes so the clones themselves don't show up as much? Right now, being invisible to infrared on earth is difficult - all that heat still has to go somewhere, or you’d cook yourself.
Polar bears, for instance, are nearly invisible in thermal cameras; they look the same temperature as the background when you're looking in far infrared. So they manage to be camouflaged in the visible spectrum and the infrared spectrum. But in near ultraviolet, they’re apparently completely black against the white snow, which goes to show the problem of having effective camouflage through multiple spectrums.
Multispectral vision wouldn’t be useful only for neutralising camouflage. Since far infrared is heat and not light, they’d be able to see through snow, rain, and other things that human eyes can’t. There’s a video here showing how well a thermal imaging camera can see through a smoke grenade - you couldn’t just pop smoke and gtfo.
On to adversarial perturbation, which I totally failed to explain. Neural nets are easy to trick in ways that humans find counter-intuitive. For instance, Google’s image recognition AI is convinced the 3D printed turtle below is actually a rifle.
Others have classified a picture of a cat as guacamole - and a pig as an airliner. There’s an introductory article here if you’re interested.
This is something the Kaminoans, or the clones, could be doing with their armour in the UV spectrum. It wouldn’t affect their ability to see each other since it would be targeting multispectral droid eyes. Even if droids used signature-based identification, like how anti-virus software is supposed to work, it could hopefully mess up their classification algorithms for a while. Buy you and your brothers some extra time.
None of this means that clone helmets don’t also have some of these abilities -Mando ones definitely do. It’s just a half-decent rationalisation as to why clone troopers generally don’t have camouflage.
