I've been curious about why digital camo would give better concealment. The following extract from Wikipedia suggests that (at least in the form of MARPAT, for clothing) it is not very effective. Also, for aviation, the background is relatively much further away than on the ground (viewer to object distance is a much smaller proportion of the object to background distance) and therefore the background appears relatively more fuzzy than the object. This would be more so with mist and haze which would not be a factor in ground battles. I get the impression that digital camo is a bit of a fashion, including for aviation.
"In the 1970s, US army officer Timothy R. O'Neill suggested that patterns consisting of square blocks of colour would provide effective camouflage.[19] This aroused little interest at the time, but by 2000, O'Neill's idea was combined with patterns like the German Flecktarn to create pixellated patterns like CADPAT or MARPAT. Battledress in digital camouflage patterns was first designed by the Canadian Forces. The "digital" refers to the coordinates of the pattern, which are digitally defined.[20] The term is also used of computer generated patterns like the non-pixellated Multicam and the Italian fractal Vegetato pattern.[21]
"According to the patent for MARPAT, pixellation does not in itself contribute to the camouflaging effect. The pixellated style, however, simplifies design and eases printing on fabric, compared to more traditional "splotchy" patterns. While pixellated patterns are becoming widespread, critics maintain that the pixellated look is a question of fashion rather than function.[19][22] However, the basis of "digital" camouflage was lost in tech reports; the design technique actually has three purposes: (1) to add high spatial frequency texture components that add concealment at closer ranges, (2) to modify visual processing of edges, and (3) to produce intermediate colours by a dithering effect.
"Digitizing" a pattern does not of itself improve performance; the design process is actually more complex, and involves color and contrast as well as overall disruptive effect of specific pattern geometry. A failure to consider all elements of pattern design tends to result in poor results. The US Army's universal camouflage pattern (UCP), for example, performed poorly because of low pattern contrast ("isoluminance" -- beyond very close range the design looks like a field of solid light gray) and arbitrary color selection, neither of which could be saved by quantizing (digitizing) the pattern geometry."
