page_title: Multi-scale camouflage
section_title: German WWII experiments
hierarchical_section_title: Multi-scale camouflage / History / German WWII experiments
caption_attribution_description: English: The Waffen-SS standard Camouflage "Erbsentarn" or dot 44 peas pattern as it is often known as.
context_page_description: Multi-scale camouflage is a type of military camouflage combining patterns at two or more scales, often with a digital camouflage pattern created with computer assistance. The function is to provide camouflage over a range of distances, or equivalently over a range of scales, in the manner of fractals, so some approaches are called fractal camouflage. Not all multiscale patterns are composed of rectangular pixels, even if they were designed using a computer. Further, not all pixellated patterns work at different scales, so being pixellated or digital does not of itself guarantee improved performance.
  The first standardized pattern to be issued was the single-scale Italian telo mimetico. The root of the modern multi-scale camouflage patterns can be traced back to 1930s experiments in Europe for the German and Soviet armies. This was followed by Canadian development of Canadian Disruptive Pattern, first issued in 2002, and then with US work which created Marine pattern, launched between 2002 and 2004.
context_section_description: During the Second World War, Johann Georg Otto Schick designed a series of patterns such as Platanenmuster (plane tree pattern) and erbsenmuster (pea-dot pattern) for the Waffen-SS, combining micro- and macro-patterns in one scheme.
  The German Army developed the idea further in the 1970s into Flecktarn, which combines smaller shapes with dithering; this softens the edges of the large scale pattern, making the underlying objects harder to discern.
caption: Waffen-SS 1944 Erbsenmuster (pea-dot pattern) combines large and small scale patterns.
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