[bigiain]

I wonder whether camouflage has changed in purpose (on fighter jets) and is no longer about "fooling" the human visual system, but about fooling computer vision.

I'd guess those "New Aesthetic" style pixelated camo paintjobs would do a pretty good job of fooling OpenCV based classifiers…

[thwest]

The purpose of the camo didn't have to change, the purpose of computer vision has been to mimic the human visual system already. Both systems of perception take pains to match the sensed scene against expected structure of objects in the natural world (high contrast gradients at object boundaries, object flow). Anything that can be made to have random structure will provide false cues to edge and flow based perception. There is some evidence of the similarity of the perception systems in projects like SSIM that correlate structure of images under sparsifying transforms such as wavelets to human quality measures.

[sp332]

I'm not sure about airplanes, but I know it's a lot harder for a human to pick out a soldier in digital camo.