Data from: Cultural evolution of military camouflage

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.Data for texture, average colour and quantised colour for camouflage uniforms.RData file contents: PatternNames - camouflage pattern identifier; SumMaxResponses - sum of maximum responses per pixels (across logical maps) for each Log-Gabor filter (described by spatial frequency and orientation); ColDistAvgColours - pairwise distances of average colours of patterns; ColDistQntColours - pairwise distances of quantised colours of patternsCamouflageUniformsAll_Data.RDat