Satellite imagery has paved the way to address natural hazards and humanitarian crisis more efficiently around the world. Many organizations, companies, and researchers are enormously exploiting the satellite data, which has become timely and high resolution with worldwide coverage. Spatial Services GmbH, located in Salzburg, is also one of the consulting services that apply satellite and geospatial data for monitoring, analysis and visualization in projects related to natural environment, climate, and humanitarian matters cooperating with several agencies and organizations in different countries.
During the internship, I was involved in humanitarian projects that were in cooperation with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The projects were partly related to extract dwellings and refugee camps by means of machine learning and deep learning models and ended up with manual revision to minimize the false positives and missed dwellings. The revision was essential due to the objectivity of the dwellings. We faced with several types of dwelling structures that their material (texture), density, and their size made it challenging to extract them through machine learning models.

The procedure helped to discover the population number estimation and their distribution to supply emergency humanitarian services to the local displaced people, and understand the people's movements and population change during conflicts. In addition, the project helped local administration authorities to update the population density estimation.

Personal Feedback

The experiences I gained during the internship are inevitable. However, due to the increasing number of projects the company is facing with, not much diverse tasks were handed over the interns. Our colleagues were already occupied with numerous tasks and there was no significant room for interns to get more in touch with the ongoing procedures. Also, some mentioned tasks at the interview were not met during the internship. Meanwhile, I am grateful for their attempt and all the communication and interactions to revise and guide my tasks. I left Spatial Services with experiences and memories, a company consisting of great people doing so much effort.