Optimizing colour for camouflage and visibility using deep learning: the effects of the environment and the observer's visual system.

ABSTRACT: Avoiding detection can provide significant survival advantages for prey, predators, or the military; conversely, maximizing visibility would be useful for signalling. One simple determinant of detectability is an animal's colour relative to its environment. But identifying the optimal colour to minimize (or maximize) detectability in a given natural environment is complex, partly because of the nature of the perceptual space. Here for the first time, using image processing techniques to embed targets into realistic environments together with psychophysics to estimate detectability and deep neural networks to interpolate between sampled colours, we propose a method to identify the optimal colour that either minimizes or maximizes visibility. We apply our approach in two natural environments

SUBMITTER: Fennell JG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6544896 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature