Determination of the characteristic colors of the terrain in the development of camouflage means

Color and pattern are integral parts of the visual characteristics of camouflage. These means, taking into account the experience of military operations during the Russian-Ukrainian war, can significantly increase the survivability and safety of personnel, weapons and military equipment, by eliminating the characteristic unmasking signs of these military facilities and hiding them on vegetative, desert-steppe, snowy and urbanized areas background. The paper considers the first stage in the design of camouflage means of concealment - the identification of the characteristic colors of the area. The identification of characteristic colors is proposed to be carried out using clustering related to unsupervised machine learning methods. The number of clusters determines the number of colors that will be displayed on the masking surface. It was determined that it is advisable to analyze terrain images stored in the digital JPEG format, and the colors are represented in the RGB additive color model. When conducting research, such a clustering method for image analysis as k-means was used, which has an advantage over other clustering methods in ease of implementation, unpretentiousness in resources and sufficient computational speed. Other clustering methods, such as hierarchical or density-based, have not proven to be suitable for image clustering. The comparison was made with the most common clustering methods: c-means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, agglomerative, spectral biclustering, etc. Various algorithmic approaches to choosing the number of clusters were tested, according to the results of the experiments, the “elbow” method was chosen as the most optimal one. Mathematical algorithms were taken from open sources, their implementation was carried out using common software libraries for machine learning of the Python programming language. The results of the work made it possible to choose mathematical algorithms for determining the number of colors of camouflage means of concealment. This will allow to analyze the terrain of all natural zones of Ukraine and design effective camouflage coverings for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.