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.