Prediction of Future Appearances via Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks Based on Image Time Series in Cloud Computing

In recent years, cloud computing has become a prevalent platform to run artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning applications. With cloud services, AI models can be deployed easily for the convenience of users. However, although cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) have provided various services to support AI applications, the design of AI models is still the key in many specific applications such as forecasting or prediction. For example, how to forecast the future appearance of ornamental plants or pets? To deal with this problem, in this paper we develop a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) model to forecast the future appearance according to their past appearance images. Specifically, we study the problem of using the pine tree’s past appearance images to forecast its future appearance images. We use a plant simulation software to generate pine tree’s growing images to train the model. As a result, our model can generate the future appearance image of the pine tree, and the generated images are very similar to the true images. This means our model can work well to forecast the future appearance based on the image series.