WHILE the interest around unmanned retailing has cooled due to problems such as the high rate of damaged goods, poor management and few customers, new technologies have recently been introduced in the unmanned retail sector to woo customers, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported.

Guangdong Wicrown Information Technology Co. Ltd. has adopted palm vein recognition technology for an unmanned cabinet. After registering as a member, the customer will have to input their personal palm vein information and complete a series of other operations. After that, the customer can have their palm scanned to gain access to the store and also to pay.

“As there are no two identical leaves that have the same veins in the world, there are no two people in the world who have the same palm veins, which means that each person’s palm veins are unique,” said Yu Qiaohong, a staffer with the company.

The technology uses the characteristics of hemoglobin in human blood to absorb near infrared light, obtain palm vein images, extract eigenvalues by positioning, enhancement, feature extraction and other algorithms, and finally compare them with the original template of the existing server to verify personal identity. At present, this kind of unmanned cabinet has already been put into use.

Another new technology used in unmanned retailing is a gravity sensing system. According to Xu Changjiang, general manager of a company that manufactures an unmanned convenience cabinet called haoStore, the cabinet can automatically update its commodity inventory.

Additionally, the cabinet uses self-developed holographic image recognition technology and radio frequency identification to identify expired food and complete payments.

Shenzhen Vision Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd. is currently developing intelligent retail image recognition technology that can be applied in various shopping scenarios. (Zhang Yu)