Europe's migration crisis seen from orbit

In images taken from a satellite floating 400 kilometers above the Earth, Europe's humanitarian crisis shows up as white pixels against the blue-green vastness of the Mediterranean. Captured by the sensors in space, small overcrowded boats with migrants leaving Africa headed north look like tiny white comets bursting through the ocean, leaving a tail where they stir waves. "It's not that with every image I look at, I think about how someone could be dying right now," said Elisabeth Wittmann as she clicked through satellite footage on her laptop showing the coast west of the Libyan port of Sabratha. "That's also to protect myself," she added. The 26-year-old computer scientist from southern Germany is one of a dozen researchers who have teamed up with a new NGO called Space-Eye to develop artificial intelligence technology that allows computers to detect migrant boats in satellite images.