Two big countries in Asia; India and China have
better demonstrated their space activities at IAF
Congress than at ISPRS. This is the reason why
ISPRS did not invite remote sensing scientists but
mainly surveyors and photogrammetrists to ISPRS
Congress because of single membership.
(3 The 9th ACRS,
November, 1988
Bangkok,Thailand
The conference was one of the most exciting and
active symposia held in Asia mainly because the Her
Royal Highness the Thai Princess Maha Chakri
Sirindhorn participated in the ACRS for four days as
the opening speaker as well as one of the speakers of
technical paper. The number of participants was 473
from 30 countries and 113 papers were presented.
Thailand has demonstrated her activities in remote
sensing in receiving satellite data of Landsat, SPOT
and MOS-1 and in promoting applications to
deforestation, disaster monitoring, shrimp farm
development, soil erosion and so on. Thailand is a
sort of center in international cooperation or aid by
Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), UN/ESCAP,
Mekon Committee, JICA, CEDA, ITC etc.
Tremendous improvement in computer hardware
and scientific research budget has been recognized in
Thailand in these ten years.
(4) IEEE Image Processing Symposium,
Singapore,September 1989
The author was invited as the chairman of the
technical session on "Applications of Image and
Signal Processing" and as a co-speaker with the
graduate student who presented a technical paper on
"Automated DTM Generation from Topographic
Maps." As the symposium was fully organized by a
commercialized conference company, the atmosphere
was very business-like. Though there were a few
interesting topics or papers, useful channels with
ISPRS were not recognized. Remote sensing and
machine vision at this IEEE symposium were very
weak.
The 10th ACRS, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, November 1989
(5)
AARS has celebrated the 10th anniversary with
441 participants from 30 countries and 87 papers. At
the General Conference, Iran was admitted as an
ordinary member of AARS.
401
Malaysia had just established Malaysian Centre for
Remote Sensing (MACRES) under the Ministry of
Science, Technology and Environment as well as
under the sponsorship of Canada International
Development Agency.
It would be a result of ACRS that the quality of
papers and posters becomes progress because the
several best speakers and the two or three best poster
presentations used to be awarded at each ACRS.
(6) ERIM Symposium, Bangkok, Thailand,
April 1990
In spite of the well known founder of remote
sensing in the world, ERIM symposium held in
Bangkok was not successful in the number of
participants and the quality of papers. The reasons
are very expensive registration fee (500 US Dollars)
for Asian people, ill selection of invited papers with
less quality or outdated topics, too much political
comments and so on. A kind of "American Show"
organized by ERIM in the past would not be
working well in future.
(7) ISPRS Com.IV Symposium,
Japan, May 1990
Tsukuba,
The first interim symposium of ISPRS commission
was held in Tsukuba Scientific City, the intelligent
center of Japanese governmental research
organizations. The main topics were integration of
remote sensing and GIS, 3D GIS, global DEM,
digital mapping and so on. The symposium was not
very much exciting but interesting with 3D GIS and
global DEM. The number of participants was 228
from 29 countries and 93 papers were presented. It
should be reported that Japanese younger scientists
were well trained in organizing the international
symposium and in presenting technical papers in
English. This is a result from the experience of
Kyoto ISPRS Congress.
(8) ISPRS Com.III Symposium,
China, May 1990
Wuhan,
The timing of the symposium was very difficult in
about one year after the Tian An Men
demonstration, which resulted in not many
participants from foreign countries (115 participants
from 24 countries) as well as not many papers (40
papers). However the quality of presented papers
was so high, for example, GIS theory, image
matching, artificial intelligent, aerial triangulation
with GPS.