Generally speaking it can have an impact, but specifically with drones who knows, and some of the drones use infrared cameras which itd be useless on.

it worked well back then, there are no documented destructions of warships by autonomous drones during world war 2!

Looks like two different attempts could be testing designs.

I have no idea, but I have some supposition: no it won't work.

Like others have said warships used to do something similar.

The naive idea is a WWII concept: that the hard lines make it more difficult to see your heading from a distance.

The problem is drones don't "see" the way people do.

I remember when facial recognition technology began to be mass deployed, it was possible to trick those algorithms with special makeup. The idea of this camouflage is to trick ai drones in the same way. But it will not work with modern ai technologies, or if drone uses other targeting system like thermal cameras, or if drone simply being operated by person.

It makes it harder to see the edges and so can't determine the objects shape, and when moving potentially how fast or in which precise direction it is moving in.

LIDAR on the other hand doesn't care for dazzle paint.

Maybe not, if the drones aren't looking for big zebras. Just depends how the AI is identifying targets.

It'd be retraining, not tweaking. And you really need a neural net that isn't fooled by weird paint patterns of any kind, or they could just move to hot pink or something next.

That was referred to as "dazzle camouflage" and the idea was to throw off the aim of German U-boats by making it more difficult to determine the size and orientation of the ship from brief periscope observation. They would them not be able to compute the correct fire control solution for their torpedos.

Dazzle was more a thing in WWI, as by WWII sonar had arrived which made it largely redundant.