Introduction

I attended the Remote Sensing Asia '02 meeting, which was held in Hangzhou, China, 23 – 27 October 2002. It was an annual meeting of the International Society for Optical Engineering being held in China and focusing on the Asia-Pacific region. At the meeting I attended sessions and also gave an invited presentation partly outlining Australia’s contribution to the NASA EO1 mission and concentrating on some aspects of processing for agricultural applications – particularly red-edge index measurements made from Hyperion. The presentation was:

“Improving the analysis of Hyperion red-edge index” and it was presenting work undertaken by the authors David Jupp, Bisun Datt, Tim McVicar, Tom Van Niel, Jay Pearlman, Jenny Lovell & Edward King.

The presentation can be seen on the EOC web site at http://www.cossa.csiro.au/pubrep/present/spie_hangzhou.pdf.

The itinerary as approved by CAR (making full use of frequent flyer points so as not to incur any expenditure) was as follows:

Date	Time	Depart From	Time	Arrive At	Flight
Oct 21	2020	Sydney	0610	Hong Kong	QF83
Oct 22	1135	Hong Kong	1325	Hangzhou	Flt 504
Oct 27	1955	Hangzhou	2150	Beijing	CA1548
Nov 5	1520	Beijing	1840	Hong Kong	CA115
Nov 5	2045	Hong Kong	0835	Sydney	QF128

Following the Conference, the period from October 28 to November 5 was taken as leave when members of my family joined me to visit Beijing and Xi’an.

Remote Sensing Asia '02

The Conference was big and well organised. The main venue was the Yellow Dragon Hotel but people not wishing to pay the $US prices stayed elsewhere – such as the very nice and more “Chinese” Huajiashan Hotel and ate in restaurants nearby – for better food at a fraction of the price. There was a large US contingent and the venue was excellent with good weather, the West Lake nearby and all the sights of one of China’s two (well, many) “earthly paradises” to see when the delegates were not engaged in meetings, serious discussions and presentations.

Opening Sessions

The plenary sessions were all concentrated at the beginning day with the different disciplines then having parallel sessions for the rest of the days. There were very good plenary discussions.

The keynote speaker was Ghassem Asrar from NASA. He picked out the recent successes of NASA programs. EO1 got a big plug and seems to be a great success in both reality and upper level management perceptions. He also pointed out many applications to the Asia-Pacific region through Jason, GRACE, AQUA and SRTM. He spoke eloquently on the benefits of science to “life” and the role of shared scientific knowledge in benefit of mankind. He re-iterated NASA’s role of exploring the universe (both earth and space) and the central role of Earth Systems Science in NASA’s programs. There is a major task to observe and understand the feedbacks in the earth system and many NASA programs are addressing technology for this purpose. However, the toughest challenge, he pointed out, is not technological but meeting societies needs. He pointed out the opportunity for the intellectual capital in the audience to share knowledge and address these challenges.

Ghassem’s address was followed by Prof Pan Delu¹ who represented the Chinese hosts. In China Prof Pan is known as a leading researcher in Ocean Colour and optical water quality remote sensing. He is an Academician and it is wonderful that this area of remote sensing can get so much good attention. His talk was similar to Ghassem’s emphasising the benefits to mankind of the free interchange of scientific information. He also showed many examples of China’s progress in water remote sensing, including HY1 and the hyperspectral sensors already being deployed from space. He outlined the roles of future technologies (including Lidars I noticed) and impressed us that they needed to be matched with communications and computer systems.

Prof Yoji Fuhurama from Japan then also re-iterated what Ghassem had started and emphasised the role of earth observation in earth care, conservation and environmentally sustainable development to benefit all of mankind. He specifically mentioned the World Summit in Johannesburg and its follow-up through CEOS. He then showed some amazing imagery coming out of Japanese experiments and sensors, especially the microwave radiometers and showed how significant advances in land surface information will come from the AMSR units on AQUA and (hopefully) ADEOS-II. He outlined the commercial side and benefits of earth observation programs (perhaps more so than NASA) and went on to expand on the work being done on global precipitation, water cycle research and the development of EarthCARE with ESA.

Prof Fuhurama was followed by another CEOS princpal – Greg Withee from NOAA. The NOAA talk was more focussed on operations than the benefits of open exchange of scientific information. But then the benefits and cooperation are very clear in weather forecasting. He indicated that NGOESS and NPOESS were providing the programs for future NOAA activities and information. There is a 10-year lead to these programs becoming operational so it is a major development. His main challenges were that we still do not have a global monitoring requirements analysis, current databases are not easily accessible, there is insufficient data reporting and that there is still not a good means for R&D to reach operational activities. They have been involved in over 100 satellites in a decade and need to get the best from the investment. This will come from best use of science to understand data, best use of computers to process it and best use of models to assimilate it.

These were the primary set of keynote speakers. The audience and even the setup of the hall changed significantly after lunch as the next set of speakers continued. The TV cameras went off to other events. Among those speakers was Prof Tong Qingxi whose discussion of hyperspectral data was especially interesting. He noted that there was considerable work on hyperspectral technology in China including a new 244-channel pushbroom instrument as well as previously established MAIS, OMIS and PHI instruments. He showed examples of applications of spectral remote sensing and their methods based on Correlation Simulation Analysis Models (CSAM). The PHI was in Malaysia at the time of the Conference as part of regional cooperation. A spaceborne imaging spectrometer had flown on the Chinese Shenzhou-3 mission (a pre-cursor to China’s manned space flights) in March 2002. The instrument had 32 spectral bands and a large number of these were shown. China has a strong hyperspectral program and there are many opportunities in it for regional cooperation.

Scientific Sessions

SPIE Conferences generally have a large number of sub-conferences that run in parallel. This was no exception. With the need to choose I attended in most cases the Ocean Color Conference with some variations for interesting papers. The main session I was in was the Conference 4898 “Image Processing and Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing”. Steve Ungar was managing this session and Rob Green and I were two of his invited speakers. There was a fully parallel set of sessions on Multispectral and Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Instruments and Applications. However, the hyperspectral talks were mixed between the sessions and not concentrated. This was a bit of a problem, as they tended to clash between the sessions.

There were some Lidar sessions and they were all (at least among the speakers who presented) aimed at atmospheric sounding. That is not a problem – just an observation. This Conference is a major atmospheric sciences Conference and many famous meteorological remote sensing people attended. Australia’s John Le Marshall attended and was awarded a high honour of a prize for his work for the TOVS working group. That was good to see.

Conference 4892: Ocean remote Sensing and Applications

The Ocean Remote Sensing sessions were very active and interesting with a huge volume of work from mainly China, Japan and various other Asia-Pacific countries being reported. There were some US and European papers but not so many. The opening remarks focussed on the wealth of satellite data becoming available and the need to use it well. Among the talks the majority could be lumped under:

• Ocean color
• Atmospheric correction
• Algorithms
• Image processing
• Algal blooms
• SST
• Microwave applications
  

The Conference proceedings will be out soon/eventually and I recommend people interested in these areas browse the papers. The papers are coming out after the Conference so they will be more representative of the presentations than is that case at many Conferences. However, of some interest to us were the presentations on HY-1.

Hy-1

The first speaker on HY1 was Liu Jianqiang who is the Chief of the HY1 Applications area. He presented basic information and discussed data availability. HY-1 (or Hai Yang, “ocean” 1) is China’s first ocean remote sensing satellite. It has two instruments on board, the Chinese Ocean Color and Temperature Sounder (COTS) with 10 bands and a 4-band CCD imager. It was launched in May 2002 and has been collecting imagery since then. It is an experimental satellite and has had limited power resources. So the number of acquisitions is limited. The data are brought in at Beijing using a SeaSat acquisition system and are currently restricted to Chinese PIs but will become available soon to interested researchers.

The next Hy1 speaker was familiar to many Australian Ocean Colour people. It was Tang Junwu who is in charge of the vicarious calibration of HY1. They have used a site in the Gobi desert (near Dunhuang) as a fixed point for calibration. The Dunhuang site is very dry and stable but also quite a low reflectance – which is good for Ocean Colour instruments as they tend to saturate out on most bright target vicarious calibration sites. The work showed the error (or difference) between pre- and post-launch calibration was very great. Over water targets they are having some issues as the above- and in-water methods are showing 10-15% variation. Junwu described the vast and impressive array of instruments his team has purchased and is deploying in the sea off China for the task. He concluded pre-launch calibration seems to be difficult, expensive and un-necessary. Despite these issues they are getting food agreement with SeaWIFs using the vicarious coefficients.

I spoke with Junwu on a few occasions and explored the possibility of collaboration. The possibility is high and in previous times China has offered to pay for experts to visit but at the time there was no capacity for the people they wished to visit. There is no DB with HY1 but they are still very interested in the waters off Perth for calibration. Junwu believes these are possibly the best waters for vicarious calibration. Maybe Peter Fearns should follow this up.

China has the most amazing set of interesting, useful and challenging applications for optical water quality remote sensing. The proceedings will show some of them. The technologies being used in many projects include SeaWIFs data as well as MODIS data and the Indian OceanSat data. There are many opportunities for collaboration but obviously funding is (as always) the issue. China has shown a much greater capacity and readiness to fund visits by overseas scientists but even this will not provide the resources needed for serious collaboration. To move beyond individual “expert” invitations and exchanges there needs to be some serious thought and search for funds. I expect the modern China will welcome ideas that involve commercialisation. But it will need significant support and resources for Australian science to benefit from that major and rapidly increasing development.

There were talks from all of the groups that were visited by CSIRO scientists in 1999 and I met a number of the scientists in the Marine delegation of 2000. Among the people we met who spoke or attended and had students speak in this session were:

Pan Delu
Yuan Yeli
He Mingxia
Huang Weigen
Wang Dongxiao
Tang Junwu
Liu Jianqiang

They are keen to revisit the plans and potential projects identified in those visits. Among the people we visited was Huang Weigen of the Second Institute of Oceanography at Hangzhou. His group presented a great number of papers on topics including ocean colour, radar sensing and SST. He is organising another delegation that could visit in February 2003. We could do well to be ready to discuss what is possible. There is such a base of sound preparation and goodwill that success is likely if the issue of under-writing can be resolved.

Session 4898 Image Processing and Pattern Recognition

Steve Ungar, Chief Scientist for the NASA EO1 Mission, organised this session and asked Rob Green and me to be invited speakers. Our talks, as was Steve’s, were strongly focussed on hyperspectral work – especially EO1 and Hyperion. It was not, however, a hyperspectral session and the hyperspectral sessions likewise had many non-hyperspectral papers being presented. The task of jumping between rooms was difficult so some were missed. Again, I will leave the interested people to check the proceedings when they appear and focus on the EO1 aspects.

Steve Ungar gave a magnificent presentation. It was not the ideal audience for the presentation. It could well have been a plenary key-note address. It showed the incredible scope of the EO1 mission ands its acquisitions. Other talks involving EO1 were from me (as indicated above, the presentation can be accessed on the EOC web site), Rob Green, Luigi Renzullo from WA CMIS and Soo-Chin Liew from Singapore. It was a good few sessions and EO1 data is in greater demand than before. As I found when I went to Beijing, EO1 data are being processed in China and there is a good opportunity also to work with the young scientists there on EO1 applications.

The Session also included classification studies, neural networks, radar applications and many very interesting pattern recognition applications. Again these can be seen when the proceedings emerge. I really enjoyed the last sessions as it really showed me a new area and new approach to image analysis that I otherwise would not have looked for.

Conclusion

That completed the Conference. After the visits to Beijing and Xi’an on leave I returned to Australia. I feel there is huge opportunity for collaboration with China. The issue is to locate support for it beyond exchange visits and invitations. The opportunities involve all of our work and many very pertinent and vital applications to environment and also developmental projects. China has been undergoing a massive cultural change to open and energetic commercialisation. I feel collaboration with China can be viewed as investment in being part of this boom. Without a long and strong background of collaboration it is a closed opportunity. We have excellent links but need to sustain them and we need to find the best emerging opportunities as well.

The Conference was also a useful opportunity to advance the links between China, Japan, Singapore and Australia that may emerge among Direct Broadcast (DB) sites that acquire MODIS and other EOS data. That activity has been progressed in Perth following the meetings in Hanzhou and may develop into a very useful interchange of high value to the regional applications of MODIS data and the development of regionally calibrated products.

As a Conference it provided the usual valuable meeting ground for people from many countries and institutions. There was a strong US contingent and the collaborative and public-good views outlined by NASA and NOAA were welcome to all who were present. Hopefully the intellectual capital at the meeting can, as challenged by Ghassem Asrar, put the combined power to work to benefit all people.

DLBJ
January 2003