#handwaving

tl;dr there’s a vaguely defensible reason clone trooper armour isn’t camo, and it’s because droid vision & pattern recognition is so different from humans 

For reasons, I was messing around with machine learning and image processing, and it got me thinking about camouflage. It only works on and for us because of how our human biological vision works, a series of hacks that kept our upstart savannah ape ancestors alive under the light of a GV star.

Droids, though? No evolutionary pressure and no tradeoffs. No grayscale at low light, no limitations in their visible spectrum. They could go all the way up infrared and ultraviolet without crashing their visual input. Their image processing and pattern recognition would be completely different. Camouflage wouldn’t work on droids, not consistently: once they’d figured out the signature for one pattern and shared it around, it’d never work again. Depending on type of camo, it might not work on a given species under a different solar spectrum, either. 

Since the Kaminoans don’t know where and who the clone troopers will be fighting, it’s a better investment for them to focus on armour development rather than camouflage patterns. Camo is too relative to the environment to usually be worth their R&D budget. Maybe they tried for ultraviolet adversarial preturbation patterns instead? Something invisible to the troopers themselves but catastrophic for machine image classification.

We do, however, see some limited use of camo patterned armour in TCW. One is during Landing at Point Rain, where arguably most of the threat is from the aerial Geonosians. It’s also a major offensive with multiple Jedi generals dirtside; maybe it was big enough to be worth changing up the patterns, especially since their major adversaries weren’t droids. 

When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world--magic, time travel, anachronisms--there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.

Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.

Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.

In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.

It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.

Ehhhhh I don’t know that “ice magic” or “hockey magic” or “Cup magic” is so much a thing, in itself, as it is the collectively agreed-upon handwave for stuff that in other fandoms you can handwave by saying “The Hellmouth did it” or “The Rift did it” or “Asgardian magic did it” or “Ancient technology did it” or “I dunno, Canada is apparently a land of inexplicable magical realism.”

Like that time when I wrote a bandom fic where Jon Walker is sometimes a kitten and it was handwaved as just “oh well it’s a thing in Jon’s family but also it is a bit contagious to maximize cuteness.” If it had been a hockey story someone would have said “oh, hockey magic.”

Bandom stories, and popslash stories before them, tended toward a version of the “hockey magic” trope, where dudes would check with dudes in other bands and find out that This Is Just A Thing That Happens when somebody, say, suddenly had the opposite set of sexual characteristics, or was turned into a puppy or a llama or a couch.

So, idk. If I weren’t already writing a “oops kid out of nowhere!” kidfic in Check, Please! I might be tempted to write “magically appearing baby for Jack and Bitty” and handwave it as hockey magic, but that niche is already occupied. And honestly I always tend toward wanting to come up with some in-universe-ish explanation for how stuff works--I mean, I’ll write an a/b/o AU, or a psychic wolves AU, but random magic shit just happening in a non-magic universe is not generally my department. 

[original post here]

tl;dr  there’s a vaguely defensible reason why clone armour is white, and it’s because droid vision and image processing means that camouflage doesn’t work

Did a bit more research about this on the grounds that if I’d thought of it, the mil-industrial complex definitely had, and found that Los Alamos National Labs - where the nuclear bomb was developed - is already doing counter-camo using an oceanographic dataset from NOAA.

We’ve already developed an algorithmic framework for image segmentation and shape analysis based on geometric modeling of principles of perceptual organization. The goal of this work was to develop efficient automated methods for detecting and analyzing features in remote sensing imagery for national security and intelligence applications.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/11/02/outsmarting-the-art-of-camouflage/

I’d decided that - after something @wrennette said -  that combat droid eyes are, by default, multispectral. A common B1 can see all the way through the human visible spectrum to far infrared and near ultraviolet. Giving them this range means that camouflage as we use it today wouldn't work, even ignoring the image processing issue as per my previous post. For example, the thermal difference between clones and the environment would be visible regardless of the patterns on their armour, like the picture below of four people in an empty parking lot.

Instead, you might focus on making sure no heat leaks through the soles of their boots, so that the droids can’t tell where they’re hiding, or track their ongoing movements via the fading heat prints on the ground. Maybe their backpacks vent heat into a diffuse plumes so the clones themselves don't show up as much? Right now, being invisible to infrared on earth is difficult - all that heat still has to go somewhere, or you’d cook yourself.

Polar bears, for instance, are nearly invisible in thermal cameras; they look the same temperature as the background when you're looking in far infrared. So they manage to be camouflaged in the visible spectrum and the infrared spectrum. But in near ultraviolet, they’re apparently completely black against the white snow, which goes to show the problem of having effective camouflage through multiple spectrums.

Multispectral vision wouldn’t be useful only for neutralising camouflage. Since far infrared is heat and not light, they’d be able to see through snow, rain, and other things that human eyes can’t. There’s a video here showing how well a thermal imaging camera can see through a smoke grenade - you couldn’t just pop smoke and gtfo.

On to adversarial perturbation, which I totally failed to explain. Neural nets are easy to trick in ways that humans find counter-intuitive. For instance, Google’s image recognition AI is convinced the 3D printed turtle below is actually a rifle. 

Others have classified a picture of a cat as guacamole - and a pig as an airliner. There’s an introductory article here if you’re interested.

This is something the Kaminoans, or the clones, could be doing with their armour in the UV spectrum. It wouldn’t affect their ability to see each other since it would be targeting multispectral droid eyes. Even if droids used signature-based identification, like how anti-virus software is supposed to work, it could hopefully mess up their classification algorithms for a while. Buy you and your brothers some extra time.

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