Camouflaged circular “prey” overlaid on the background image for which they were evolved: tree bark, twisty wire sculpture, flowers and leaves, serpentine, granite, lentils.
Abstract:
This paper presents an abstract
computation model of the evolution of camouflage in nature. The 2d
model uses evolved textures for prey,
a background texture representing the environment
and a visual predator. In
these experiments, the predator’s role is played by a human observer.
They are shown a cohort of
ten evolved textures overlaid on the background texture. They click on
the five most conspicuous prey to remove (“eat”) them. These lower
fitness textures are removed from the population and replaced with
newly bred textures. Biological morphogenesis is represented in this
model by procedural texture synthesis.
Nested expressions of generators and operators form a texture
description language. Natural evolution is represented by genetic programming, a variant of
the genetic algorithm. GP
searches the space of texture description programs for those which
appear least conspicuous to the predator.
Paper in the proceedings of ALife XII: August 19-23, 2010, Odense, Denmark:
Craig Reynolds. 2010. Interactive Evolution of Camouflage. To appear in the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife XII), August 2010.
Full paper (PDF, 3.6 MB)
Poster at SIGGRAPH 2010, July 25-29, Los Angeles, California:
Craig Reynolds. 2010. Using Interactive Evolution to Discover Camouflage Patterns.
One page summary (PDF, 0.3 MB)
Additional images:
Screen shot of interactive evolution session using the “serpentine” environment. A cohort of ten evolved camouflage textures are displayed overlaid on the background image (a photograph of polished stone).
Time
series of images showing entire background with cohort of ten
camouflaged prey:
Time series of images showing individual prey over a portion of the background:
Addumdum / Errata:
The paper failed to specify a
significant parameter: the size of evolved prey. The circular prey were
100 pixels in diameter. The “thumbnail” images of
individual prey (top of this page) show a 200 by 200 pixel rectangle of
the background
image with a 100 pixel diameter prey centered on it.
Related links:
The subsystem used to represent and
render the textures used in this work: Texture
Synthesis Diary
Last update: September 3, 2010, Craig Reynolds