Cartoon-Character Costume Head with Emotional Facial Expressions

Abstract

At a theme park or entertainment show, actors wearing a cartoon-character costumes entertain guests. Unfortunately, existing cartoon-character costumes have heads with a fixed facial expression. We propose a novel cartoon-character costume where the head is equiped with a web camera inside and display panel outside. When an actor wears the head, the web camera captures the face of the actor. Based on the pattern classification technique, the facial expression is classified into one of five categories of emotion: anger, joy, sadness, surprise and neutrality. For each category, a corresponding facial image is chosen from a bank of facial images of cartoon characters. The chosen image is depicted on the display panel as the face in real time. The new costume head enables the actor to communicate with audiences interactively and play the other characters immediately by changing the facial image bank.