Nice examples, but to be fair these images are still very different from what you would experience in real life:

- The resolution is very low and makes it even harder to see the soldiers

- Depth perception is lacking (again, making it hard to find the soldiers)

- These are still images. In real-life, you could spot anomalies with movement. (e.g. if grass is moving in the wind, you could spot some weird shape that is surprisingly still vs moving grass)

- oh and of course if you have infrared goggles...

These pictures barely have enough resolution to see the snipers when they're circled.

"Look for the ghillie suit" narrows it down to 3-4 options per image. Of course, by that time, if I'm the target, he's already de-assing the place where I turned into a fine, red, mist.

Also, there's a big difference between the snipers that take you out at a distance where you could pick them out of the undergrowth and where you don't get the chance to hear the shot that took you out.

Snipers want to live, too, and they're very valuable. You may complain about the low resolution or the lack of IR or depth perception, but those won't help you find someone with the thermal signature of a rabbit 500-2000m away.

Clearly, the solution is to ask them to please stand up. Didn't you people learn anything from "How Not To Be Seen"? :)

The number of people pointing out that in real life they could use depth perception leads me to believe that there some HN readers are aliens whose eyes are significantly farther apart than human eyes [1].

It would be interesting if enough of these images were available to see how well Geoff Hinton or Yann LeCun (or a graduate student of either of them) could do on this with a neural network.

[1] Yes, I know that there are many monocular depth clues, but many (most?) of those work in photos (and movies). It is the binocular ones that people usually mean when they compare a photo to a live scene.

This is kind of scary, however infrared would give away most of them. With kind of progress high-tech glasses have, I do not expect plain camouflage to be effective at such short distances for much longer.

This is too easy. You know what's really fun? A crappy, low-resolution Where's Waldo. Have at it:

http://i.imgur.com/Un9aIRe.png

And now in a way that doesn't force you to flip through that ad filled slideshow... http://imgur.com/a/Ldx6T

There's no slideshow with javascript disabled.

I love how many comments in this thread imply that they would be able to spot a sniper in real life, due to depth perception or whatever other factor.

There's a reason snipers are so feared in warfare. They tend to be very good at what they do, and what they do is kill people while avoiding detection.

These pictures make me respect sniper camouflage even more than I already did... if I can't spot them in a cropped picture, how would I ever spot them in a 360 degree landscape over an area of indeterminate size?

Maybe growing up or spending a lot of time in the depicted environment helps? I spotted him right away in all but one of the woodland/meadow scenes but couldn't find him in the riverbed/rock scenes.

Every time I thought I spotted one, I was wrong.

But clearly depth perception and movement, not to mention infared, would help distinguish them.

Not saying it would make it significantly easier, but not having depth perception does not help trying to pick out anomalies.