Caricature generation system PICASSO-2 exhibited at expo2005 and its performance improvement

We had been researching and developed the original caricature generation system PICASSO. We realized an automated PICASSO system called PICASSO-2. We exhibited the robot that used PICASSO-2 system in the named COOPER in which PICASSO-2 is fabricated, at Aichi Expo EXPO2005. This robot acquires the face image of the visitor, extracts the facial features automatically, deforms them as his caricature, describes it on the shrimp rice cracker, and finally presents the facial caricature to the visitor. COOPER takes a couple of facial images with CCD camera, extracts the facial features from the images, and generates the facial caricature. Afterwards we evaluated the performance of the caricatures by two approaches; accuracy of the facial feature extraction in the image processing and quality of the facial parts drawing in the caricature generation. In this paper, we introduce the subjects which are obtained from the experimental performance evaluation, and we propose the improvement method in order to cope with these subjects.