Russians started painting trucks in "zebra" pattern to fool machine vision - The Economist

Russian military trucks in Ukraine have begun to appear in a new bright color scheme in recent months - with expressive black and white stripes. Such camouflage is designed for machine vision, not the human eye.

This is reported by The Economist.

It is indicated that the "zebra" pattern is intended to interfere with the operation of the machine vision systems that Ukrainian drones are equipped with. These stripes resemble the "dazzle camouflage" used by the Royal Navy during World War I.

But while dazzle camouflage was intended to break up a ship's silhouette, making it difficult to judge its speed and course, the new variant aims to fool machines into thinking that a truck isn't actually a truck at all.

The publication explains that machine vision is based on pattern matching. A model is trained by showing it images, some of which contain trucks (or tanks, or planes), and others that don't. Based on billions of such images, the computer derives rules that allow it to recognize the objects that its trainers want to teach it about.

Todd Humphreys, an engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that because trucks with zebra stripes are unlikely to appear in training data, an AI that encounters one in the real world might not know what it is looking at.

In the context of the russia-Ukraine war, russian aircraft were seen parked with rows of old tires on their wings to confuse the drone's image-matching software. Some russian drones now also have their own "zebra" camouflage, presumably to make them harder to identify by Ukrainian interceptor drones.

"Such tactics are likely to become more common. Currently, most combat drones are still controlled by a human operator, who is unlikely to be fooled by such markings. But as drones proliferate - Ukraine plans to produce 10 million units this year - and technology improves, artificial intelligence will take on more and more tasks," the publication notes.

The likely outcome will thus be an arms race in which increasingly sophisticated machine vision systems will confront increasingly sophisticated methods of deceiving them. At the same time, the advantage of any particular camouflage pattern is likely to be temporary.

"Eventually, when zebra-striped trucks become common enough, they will start to appear in the training data, and the models will start to recognize them for what they really are. A spokesman for Brave1, a Ukrainian government unit that aims to accelerate the development of military technology, acknowledged that the russians are adapting, but noted that Ukraine is adapting faster," the publication summarized.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, on the night of July 9, drones attacked two fuel infrastructure facilities in the aggressor country of russia. The strikes caused fires at oil depots in Tver and the city of Mikhailovsk in the Stavropol Krai.