Final Report of the conference on information extraction from SAR and optical data, with emphasis on developing countries

JOINT MEETING OF ISPRS COMMISSION VII
WG2 & WG7
16-18 May 2007 ISTANBUL

by Dr. Çiğdem GÖKSEL & Dr. Fusun BALIK ŞANLI

The group meeting of ISPRS Comission VII, WG 7 & 2 was carried out for 2 and a half days with scientific exchange of the ideas. We had 2 plenary sessions with four keynote speakers and five technical sessions with well attendance.

On the first day we welcomed about 100 participants. The participants were from Turkey, Germany, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Netherlands Japan, Iran and Canada. On behalf of Istanbul Technical University (ITU), the rector and the dean of Civil Engineering Faculty made their opening speeches, briefly introducing the University, the role of the university in science and engineering, and education perspectives. On behalf of the other hosting university, the head of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Division of Civil Engineering Faculty of Yildiz Technical University made his opening speech. Finally the head of the Remote Sensing Division, Geodesy and Photogrammetry Engineering Department ITU made his opening speech, summarizing departmental activities in the remote sensing area. The honorary speakers encouraged scientific knowledge share between the contributors and wished a pleasant meeting and a stay in Istanbul to all who attended the workshop.

As the keynote speaker of the opening session, Prof. Dr. Orhan Altan secretary General of ISPRS reviewed the Role of Remote Sensing and introduced the modern techniques emerging and showed how remote sensing could be employed for the benefit of societies.

In total 35 presentations have been given and out of 26 were oral presentations. The presenters were from Turkey, the Netherlands, Germany, Iran, Japan Greece, Canada and Italy.

In the plenary sessions, recent developments in remote sensing and SAR technologies were reviewed by various keynote speakers. In the first plenary session, Dr. Yousif Hussin from ITC -The Netherlands made presentation on "Synthetic Aperture Radar and Optical Satellite Images for Detecting and Monitoring Tropical Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Southeast Asia". Following him, Didier Mendel General Directory of EUROSENSE-France made his speech on "Operational Remote Sensing, Some Examples from Europe". In the second plenary session, Dr. Ziyadin Çakır from Geology Engineering Department of ITU made his speech on "Monitoring Earthquake Cycle Using SAR Interferometry". As the last presentation Prof Dr. Filiz Sunar, head of Center for Satellite Communications & Remote Sensing of ITU made her speech on "The Role of ITU CSCRS for Environmental and Security Issues in TURKEY".

In the first technical session, the role of SAR and InSAR in deformation monitoring and earth quake research was reviewed with 6 presentations. Then a poster session was held. There, various uses of Remote Sensing Technique such as determining tobacco planted areas, urban monitoring, visual image interpretation, geomorphometric analysis and etc. was included.

In the second technical session, the solutions from high resolution and hyper spectral satellite images were discussed with 6 presentations. Applications on vegetation quality, shoreline change detection, atmospheric correction techniques, and extraction of building features were reviewed.

In the third technical session, image and data fusion techniques were discussed with 4 presentations. The contribution on various areas such as soil moisture estimation detecting and monitoring illegal logging and tropical rain forest encroachment from both optical and SAR data, and others were presented.

In the fourth technical session, synergy of optical and SAR data was discussed with 5 papers. Topics such as different landscape categories, measurement of glacier surface motion mapping and monitoring flooding systems were included.

In the last the fifth technical session, feature extraction from SAR images was discussed. Popular areas such as monitoring crop growth in rice paddies, and global mapping in 3D, urban and land cover change monitoring, low cost real time SAR simulations etc were discussed.

In addition to the presentations, exhibitions were also held next to the conference hall. We had 3 exhibitors one from the Belgium ERUSENSE, one from Japan ERSDAC and one from Turkey NIK INSAAT.

At the end of the third day, the CSCRS ground station of ITU was visited and online data acquisition was performed following the orientation of the radar antenna.