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Eye Tracking Improves Camouflage Effectiveness

Eye Tracking Improves Camouflage Effectiveness At Eye Tracking Update we talk a lot about what you can see. But what about what you can’t see?

Dr. Timothy O’Neill is a camouflage consultant and a retired Army officer who founded the Engineering Psychology program at West Point years ago. He also created the basis of the camouflage pattern on the Army Combat Uniform, beginning his work prior to grad school. He was the one responsible for creating the “digital” camouflage design that we see now. It’s sort of a squared pattern that he calls “texture match,” and O’Neill created it while doing tests with a team back in 1977.

According to an interview published at the US Army’s website, O’Neill wanted a texture to match natural backgrounds, so they used an expired M113 armored personnel carrier out into a field and painted it by hand. The entire thing was done with a 2-inch paint roller, which made 2-inch squares, and this ended up testing well against camouflage patterns the Army was using at the time. O’Neill created various patterns for the Marines, Army, and Navy programs, adapting each texture match for the specific environment.

And how did O’Neill know so much about camouflage? Through eye tracking, of course. Eye tracking was used at West Point when the Engineering Psychology program did a number of studies on how humans detect and recognize camouflaged targets.

It’s a sophisticated task to detect a target, as the eye and brain are both interacting to recognize something, but there’s an additional factor of decision-making that goes on in the brain when looking for a target. Last year O’Neill and a team of cadets tested texture match samples on uniforms and rifles again using eye tracking. With a set of shooting glasses equipped with 2 small video cameras mounted to the frame, they could pass data along to a computer as a soldier searched for camouflaged targets. The cameras measured the cornea and retinal reflections to compute the eye’s angle and gaze direction. O’Neill and his team would then measure the time it took to recognize various camouflaged objects and then decide whether or not it was a target.

Camouflage design is data driven – there is a science to it as opposed to randomly placing colors next to each other in patterns. And good science, in this case, can make the difference between life and death. It’s incredible to see how eye tracking is used in the process to create good science.

West Point explores science of camouflage

Eye Tracking Improves Camouflage Effectiveness

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