The National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR) at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（CAS）, was established in 1987 to become one of the first state key laboratories in China. It is conveniently located in Zhong Guan Cun, China’s “silicon valley”, in the capital city Beijing, and is easily reached to downtown areas and the Capital International Airport.
The NLPR has an energetic team of young talented researchers active in cutting-edge research in the broad field of Pattern Recognition, with specific interests in speech and language processing, image processing and computer vision, pattern recognition and biometrics. Currently, the faculty consists of 98 staff researchers supported by a team of 6 technicians and secretaries. Almost all staff researchers possess a PhD degree. The NLPR currently has 86 MSc and 176 PhD students, 11 post-doctoral fellows and about 50 visiting researchers from China and overseas. The NLPR members publish widely in leading national and international journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on PAMI, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, NeuroImage, Human Brain Mapping, Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, Eurospeech, ICASSP, ICSLP, ICCV, CVPR，MICCAI, ACCV, etc. They are also active in program committees and editorial boards of these journals and conferences. The NLPR frequently organizes and hosts national and international conferences or workshops in its fields.
As a state key laboratory, the NLPR receives regular funding from various departments of the Chinese Government. It also attracts funds through R&D projects from many other national and international sources such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Hi-Tech R&D Program (the 863 Program), the National Key Fundamental Research Program (the 973 Program) and international co-operation programs. Currently, the NLPR undertakes more than 100 R&D projects.

The NLPR is always keen on establishing academic links with world leading research laboratories. It currently hosts the Sino-French Laboratory for Computer Science, Automation and Applied Mathematics (LIAMA), Which was founded in 1997 and is jointly funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and INRIA, France. Each year, the LIAMA sponsors a number of research projects undertaken jointly by Chinese and French researchers. LIAMA is widely regarded as a flagship in international scientific cooperation. Each year NLPR members are seen at many international conferences and each year a large number of leading researchers from around the globe come and visit the NLPR.