Facial Caricaturing Robot COOPER with Laser Pen and Shrimp Rice Cracker in Hands Exhibited at EXPO2005

Facial caricature as a facial image media acts as an interface between the user and the computer. We developed the facial caricaturing robot “COOPER” (Fig. 1) that was exhibited at the Prototype Robot Exhibition of EXPO 2005 [1]. 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, and gives a caricature drawn by the laser pen on the shrimp rice cracker to the visitor. We have been developing a facial caricaturing system PICASSO [2], and we customized this system for the exhibition at the EXPO pavilion. This paper illustrates the outline of the COOPER and the details of the image processing fabricated in it. And we discusses on the COOPER’s prospects of the future subjects based on more than 395 facial caricatures obtained at EXPO2005.