Facial Caricaturing Robot COOPER Exhibited at EXPO2005 and Its Improvements

We developed the facial caricaturing robot "COOPER" that was exhibited at the Prototype Robot Exhibition of EXPO 2005, Aichi Japan during 11 days from Jun.9 to Jun.19. COOPER watches the face of a person seated at the chair, obtains facial images, and analyzes the images to extract 251 feature points to generate his facial line drawings with deformation. It is noted that the caricature was drawn on the specialized "Shrimp rice cracker " in 4 minutes. To do this we customized the original system PICASSO by coping with the illumination circumstances in EXPO pavilion. This paper illustrates the outline of the COOPER and the details of the image processing in it. And we discusses on the prospects of the future subjects based on more than 352 facial caricatures obtained at EXPO2005. 1