Once upon a time—I’ve seen this story in several versions and several places, sometimes cited as fact, but I’ve never tracked down an original source—once upon a time, I say, the US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect camouflaged enemy tanks.
This document has a citation for the story: (Skapura, David M. and Peter S. Gordon, Building Neural Networks, Addison-Wesley, 1996.) I don’t know for sure if that is the end of the trail or not.
The 2 hits for ‘tanks’ neither seemed to be relevant; ditto for ‘clear’. No hits for ‘cloudy’ or ‘skies’ or ‘enemy’; there’s one hit for ‘sky’, pg 206, where it talks about a plane recognition system that worked well until the plane moved close to the ground and then became confused because it had only learned to find ‘the darkest section in the image’.
The bottom of page 199 seems to be about “classifying military tanks in SAR imagery”. It goes on to say it is only interested in “tank” / “non-tank” categories.
This document has a citation for the story: (Skapura, David M. and Peter S. Gordon, Building Neural Networks, Addison-Wesley, 1996.) I don’t know for sure if that is the end of the trail or not.
Discussed here, there’s a few bits that might be useful.
No page number, unfortunately. Not in library.nu; closest copy to me was in the New York Public Library. I then looked in Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=RaRbNBqGR1oC
The 2 hits for ‘tanks’ neither seemed to be relevant; ditto for ‘clear’. No hits for ‘cloudy’ or ‘skies’ or ‘enemy’; there’s one hit for ‘sky’, pg 206, where it talks about a plane recognition system that worked well until the plane moved close to the ground and then became confused because it had only learned to find ‘the darkest section in the image’.
EDIT: https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
The bottom of page 199 seems to be about “classifying military tanks in SAR imagery”. It goes on to say it is only interested in “tank” / “non-tank” categories.