Concealment

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Concealment or hiding is obscuring something from view or rendering it inconspicuous, the opposite of exposure. A military term is CCD: camouflage, concealment and deception (looks the same as the surroundings, cannot be seen, looks like something else, respectively); in a wider sense the other two are also forms of hiding.

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The objective of hiding is often to keep the presence of an object or person secret, but in other cases not the presence is a secret, but only the location.

More generally an object may be hidden from view, either purposely, or as a side effect; in this case the presence of the object is not necessarily a secret. Examples:

[edit] In nature

Many organisms have evolved various forms of concealment. See the articles crypsis, camouflage and mimicry.

[edit] Military tactics

  • In the genre of military tactics, the term refers to any object, vegetation, terrain feature, or phenomenon (i.e., night, smoke, fog) that prevents a combatant (or unit of combatants) from being seen by the enemy. In differentiation from the similar concept of cover, concealment cannot protect against actual projectiles.

[edit] Computer science and programming

  • Information hiding is the hiding of design decisions in a computer program that are most likely to change.
  • Hidden surface determination is the process used to determine which surfaces and parts of surfaces are not visible from a certain viewpoint.

[edit] Information and data

  • Cryptography is the study of message secrecy.
  • Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured.

[edit] Fiction

[edit] See also