thanks i'm learning lots unexpectedly, and confirming journos can't get basic facts straight.   a quick lookup tells me hyperspectrometry is being researched for drones. it basically boils up to taking a ton of pictures in a ton of different spectrums, calculate how much of a tiny specific slice of the spectrum is reflected for all the slices to determine the material of the objects you photographed. and some other math. the math is really simple and repetitious, the problem is that it's a ton, so the solution is to parallelize the math, through application specific circuits. it was used for satellites, but it'd be really easy to see a ship. it's surrounded by water, and it shows up in spectrometry really easy, reflecting and absorbing the same segments of the light spectrum. the paint would have to imitate how light behaves when it hits water, and that's not easy to do as far as i know.
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