Detecting formation and growth of refugee / displaced person camps in the Ukraine crisis: Assisting first-phase humanitarian response using satellite imagery

Amid the worst population displacement crisis in Europe since World War 2, governments and international organizations have struggled with the massive task of tracking and providing aid to Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). This presentation reviews requirements and explores solutions for AI-assisted monitoring of formation of ad-hoc refugee encampments and temporary/informal settlements in remotely-sensed imagery to support time-critical humanitarian operations. Data and models for binary geospatial prediction of camp location as well as time-series camp expansion will be discussed, as will deep methods for characterizing similarities and differences among detected encampments.