Custom camouflage

If a bulky electrical box has to be placed at the edge of a public park, what's the best way to conceal it so that it won't detract from its surroundings? At the conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June, researchers from MIT and several other institutions take a first stab at answering these types of questions, with a new algorithm that can analyze photos of a scene, taken from multiple perspectives, and produce a camouflage covering for an object placed within it. The researchers developed a range of candidate algorithms and tested them using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing application, scoring them according to the amount of time volunteers took to locate camouflaged objects in synthetic images. Objects hidden by their best-performing algorithm took, on average, more than three seconds to find -- significantly longer than the casual glance the camouflage is intended to thwart. According to Andrew Owens, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and lead author on the new paper, the problem of disguising objects in a scene is, to some degree, the inverse of the problem of object detection, a major area of research in computer vision.