Prasanna Krishnasamy

Perception engineer building machines that see and understand the world.

I'm currently at Waymo, working on the Perception team to build the world's most trusted autonomous driver. My career has spanned the frontiers of AR/VR, robotics, and autonomous driving — from pioneering perception systems at Magic Leap and Apple to leading computer vision at startups like Trifo, Arraiy, and Stack AV.

Notable contribution: I created the ChArUco Board for camera calibration — widely used in computer vision — and collaborated with Sergio Garrido-Jurado to bring it into OpenCV.
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Past Experience

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Sr. Software Engineer, Perception Waymo June 2025 – Present
Building the world's most trusted driver on the Perception team.
Staff Software Engineer Stack AV Sept 2023 – Apr 2025
Worked on autonomous trucking perception systems.
Director of Perception Trifo May 2020 – July 2023
Led perception and prototyping efforts. Designed and implemented the deep learning model on the Lucy vacuuming robot, built the learning infrastructure on Google Cloud, managed deployment via TFLites, and prototyped with robotic arms.
Sr. CV Algorithm Engineer Apple Dec 2018 – Apr 2020
Implemented deep learning based event detection algorithms on videos. Extensively analysed 3D time series data and implemented 3D algorithms such as fast plane fitting and orientation estimation on pointclouds.
Engineer, Computer Vision Arraiy Mar 2017 – Nov 2018
Worked on making visual content creation easier for artists using computer vision and deep learning. Built solutions for matting foregrounds using deep learning and geometry. Arraiy was acquired by Matterport. New York Times article
Sr. Software Engineer, Computer Vision Magic Leap Nov 2013 – Mar 2017
Worked on hand pose estimation, deep learning for gestures, depth cameras, object tracking, multiple camera pose and calibration. These were features that enabled mixed-reality experiences.
Software Dev Engineer Amazon Lab126 July 2011 – Oct 2013
Worked on object tracking, machine learning for gesture recognition, and 3D plane finding on the emerging technologies team.
Graduate Student Researcher University of California, San Diego Sept 2010 – June 2011
Worked under Prof. David Kriegman and Prof. Serge Belongie on modeling distorted fingerprints and increasing the accuracy of fingerprint recognition systems.

Open Source

Mentored summer developers for software contributions into OpenCV as a Google Summer of Code Mentor:

2015
Sergio Garrido-Jurado
2014
Dense Optical Flow Estimation – Deep Flow
Tomasz Pietruszka

Talks

Conversation on Builder Nation for Robotics Innovators 2023 about Trifo