ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Cultural evolution of military camouflage.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- From biological surfaces to engineered systems: how synthetic and systems biology enable biomimetic design.Frontiers in systems biology · 2026Review
- Article
- Matching Multiple Backgrounds: Egg Camouflage Across Different Habitats in a Shorebird.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Identification of camouflage military individuals with deep learning approaches DFAN and SINETV2.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Discriminative context-aware network for camouflaged object detection.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2024Article
- Biomimetic chameleon soft robot with artificial crypsis and disruptive coloration skin.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Optimizing colour for camouflage and visibility using deep learning: the effects of the environment and the observer's visual system.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
- The current and future state of animal coloration research.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Animal coloration research: why it matters.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While one has evolved and the other been consciously created, animal and military camouflage are expected to show many similar design principles. Using a unique database of calibrated photographs of camouflage uniform patterns, processed using texture and colour analysis methods from computer vision, we show that the parallels with biology are deeper than design for effective concealment. Using two case studies we show that, like many animal colour patterns, military camouflage can serve multiple functions. Following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, countries that became more Western-facing in political terms converged on NATO patterns in camouflage texture and colour. Following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the resulting states diverged in design, becoming more similar to neighbouring countries than the ancestral design. None of these insights would have been obtained using extant military approaches to camouflage design, which focus solely on concealment. Moreover, our computational techniques for quantifying pattern offer new tools for comparative biologists studying animal coloration.This article is part of the themed issue 'Animal coloration: production, perception, function and application'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.