Abstract
Most methods for camouflage assessment are designed to place two or more camouflage patterns into the same backgrounds, and compare the effect based on detection time or detection distance. The result only shows the performance of one pattern surpasses the others, but lacks the information about how good the pattern is. Those methods left out the factor that backgrounds may be one of the factors that cause long searching time. Originally, one needs longer searching time for backgrounds of high complexity; therefore, one pattern may possess longer detection time than another, but may be shorter than the searching time of the background itself. It implies the performance of the pattern is not good enough. We present an idea that backgrounds may affect the way how observers search and this factor should be taken into consideration for camouflage assessment. The experiment, in which the observers were asked to search in five images taken from different likely battle fields, is meant to find if the model of visual search differs from diverse backgrounds. The observers’ eye movement data including fixation, saccade, fixation duration, blink rate and total search time during the experiment was recorded and established for further analysis of the features of the backgrounds resulting in the diversity of searching in a way of quantification. The conclusion provides a quite objective basis for camouflage assessment.