Computer Vision and AI R&D Engineer
February 2023 - Current
I currently apply Computer Vision and Deep Reinforcement Learning to the disassembly of electric car batteries.
Francesco Sarno
Computer Vision and AI R&D Engineer
I'm a computer vision and robotics research engineer currently working at the Swiss Battery Technology Center within the Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne.
My work focuses on applying cutting-edge computer vision and deep learning techniques to challenging real-world problems.
I earned my Master's degree in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zurich in 2021, following a Bachelor's degree in Automation Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2018.
My primary research interests include computer vision, 3D vision, AutoML, deep learning, and reinforcement learning.
You can download my CV here: Download CV [Updated: May 2025].
Experience
Computer Vision Specialist
Mar 2025 - Current
POC on LLM and OCR for document understanding.
Computer Vision Specialist
Aug 2024 - Feb 2025
POC on damage detection and classification on reflective surfaces.
Computer Vision Specialist
May 2024 - Current
POC on 3D indoor scene synthesis based on NVIDIA Omniverse and LLM.
Computer Vision Specialist
September 2023 - February 2024
Gold bars fraud detection: application of deep learning computer vision approaches for feature detection and matching.
Computer Vision Research Engineer
March 2022 - March 2023
I worked on multiple computer vision and 3D vision problems under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Pascal Fua.
Computer Vision Engineer
August 2021 - December 2021
I had the opportunity to work with real world data aiming to achieve sparse 3D reconstruction of cars after accidents.
Research Assistant
May 2021 - December 2021
I worked on surface normals estimation and view synthesis (NeRF-based) problems under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Suryansh Kumar.
Computer Vision and Robotics Intern
February 2020 - December 2020
Intern role in the Fire Control and Simulation division where I worked on improving accuracy evaluation end visualization of aerial weapons.
Publications
[WACV22] Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo
Francesco Sarno, Suryansh Kumar, Berk Kaya, Zhiwu Huang, Vittorio Ferrari, Luc Van Gool, Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Google Research, KU Leuven.
[WACV22] Neural Radiance Fields Approach to Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo
Berk Kaya, Suryansh Kumar, Francesco Sarno, Vittorio Ferrari, Luc Van Gool, Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Google Research, KU Leuven.
Awards
NVIDIA GTC 2025 Best Poster Presentation Award
Pioneering Automated EV Battery Recycling: Leveraging Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Disassembly
Francesco Sarno, Jesse Isoaho, Özhan Özen, Raphael Rätz, Gabriel Hidalgo, Christian Ochsenbein
Projects
FCPR-Net - Fully Convolutional Place Recognition Network
Francesco Sarno, Pietro Griffa, Alberto Dall'Olio, Alexander Hatteland.
Volunteering
Google Developer Student Club Zurich
October 2021 - October 2022
Core Team Member role in the GDSC Zurich community.