The second-generation Suning BIU store opened at the Xinjie entrance in Nanjing. Compared with the first-generation BIU store technology, face recognition time of the second generation has shortened from 10 seconds to 6 seconds and among the large number of black techs inside the store, the "face recognition" was even more fabulous. On the basis of face recognition, "face beauty evaluation" can score the user's face； "accurate recommendation" can recommend products to users, "VR electronic window" can capture user's expression and match interesting emoji copy for customers. To test Suning's "face recognition" technology, "twins" and "coser" came from all over the country to challenge but it could be done in seconds by the technology.

In fact，without the efforts of Suning's huge research team, these novel and exciting experiences can not exist. The Suning Institute in Silicon Valley is an important part of the research team. Wang Zhiguan, senior architect of Suning Research Institute in Silicon Valley , shared the secrets behind the Suning’s face recognition technology at the QCon Global Software Development Conference held at the Beijing International Conference Center.
 As a top event on technology in the world , hundreds of biggies at home and abroad share their technological innovations and best practices. Wang Zhiguan introduced the latest achievements of Suning face recognition technology and its application in the scene such as unmanned shops with the title of "Face Recognition Technology in Unmanned Shops", which was greatly praised by experts of the industry.

Face recognition is a kind of computer application technology which can identify or verify individuals from digital image or video. The construction of a complete face recognition system includes image acquisition, face detection, face alignment, feature representation and classification recognition. Traditionally, this technology has been used in security systems and can be compared with other biometric techniques, such as fingerprint identification, iris identification and so on. Nowadays, it has been widely used in intelligent business, entertainment, finance, marketing and other industries. Face recognition technology in Suning unmanned stores, has been able to accurately identify and track the behavior of customers in stores and to finish the “face recognition”process.

During the speech, Wang Zhiguan introduced the present situation and development of face recognition industry. With the achievement of image recognition, the accuracy of face recognition has made a great leap forward. In March of this year, in the international authoritative face recognition open test LFW and MegaFace, the face recognition model trained by Suning Research Institute in Silicon Valley ranked the first and third place respectively. The accuracy of testing on LFW is as high as 99.83, surpassing many well-known companies at home and abroad.
In the process of advancing smart retailing by Suning, technology innovation became more and more important. Zhang Jindong, chairman of Suning Holdings Group, claimed that technology has become the core support for every aspect in retail development while IT is the "strongest brain" and "core kinetic energy" of enterprises.Without technical support, the retail industry will be unable to move. With the promotion of Zhang Jindong, Suning plans to expand the number of IT R&D personnel to 10,000, which shows that Suning values the importance of the technology.
The Suning Research Institute in Silicon Valley, founded in 2013, is the vanguard of Suning's technological development. There are top engineers, researchers and analysts from different professional areas such as innovative applications, big data, artificial intelligence, and in-depth learning. They are the reservoir for Suning hi-tech talents and the propellants for the development and application of cutting-edge technology.
In addition, online and offline scene provides the opportunity for the exploration and research of technology. It is generally believed that face recognition has gained great achievement and how to make the technology into a specific industry and get the accumulated big data to benefits is an urgent problem. In this respect, Suning has unique application scenarios and data scale, which is difficult for many competitors to achieve.
Suning has explored a mature business model for unmanned stores in 2017 while it is still in the conceptual and exploring stage and has quickly opened six stores across the country, opening scale operation of unmanned stores.,
In the wave of smart retail, technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have become as rigid demand as water, electricity and coal in the industrial age. As a leader in retail industry, Suning has been continuously invested in the field of science and technology year by year, especially the computer vision, one of the key investment fields. The precipitation of technology, wise decision-making and appropriate industry ecology will certainly help Suning's computer vision technology, making it an important technological innovation power for Suning to lead the reform of China's retail industry.