Color vision deficiencies and camouflage: a comparative study between normal and CVD observers

Abstract

There is a belief that observers with color vision deficiencies (CVD) perform better in detecting camouflaged objects than normal observers. Some studies have concluded contradictory findings when studying the performance of normal and CVD observers in the camouflage detection tasks in different conditions. This work presents a literature review on this topic, dividing it into three different and contradictory types of results: better performance for CVD, for normal observers, or same performance. Besides, two psychophysical experiments have been designed and carried out in a calibrated computer monitor on both normal and CVD human observers to measure the searching times of the different types of observers needed to find camouflaged stimuli in two different types of stimuli. Results show the trend that, in our experimental conditions, normal observers need shorter searching times than CVD observers in finding camouflaged stimuli both in images of natural scenes and in images with synthetic stimuli.