Video prediction, which aims to synthesize new consecutive frames subsequent to an existing video. However, its performance suffers from uncertainty of the future. As a potential weather application for video prediction, short time precipitation nowcasting is a more challenging task than other ones as its uncertainty is highly influenced by temperature, atmospheric, wind, humidity and such like. To address this issue, we propose a star-bridge neural network (StarBriNet). Specifically, we first construct a simple yet effective star-shape information bridge for RNN to transfer features across time-steps. We also propose a novel loss function designed for precipitaion nowcasting task. Furthermore, we utilize group normalization to refine the predictive performance of our network. Experiments in a Moving-Digital dataset and a weather predicting dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms for video prediction and precipitation nowcasting, achieving satisfied weather forecasting performance.
@cite_4: The goal of precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity in a local region over a relatively short period of time. Very few previous studies have examined this crucial and challenging weather forecasting problem from the machine learning perspective. In this paper, we formulate precipitation nowcasting as a spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem in which both the input and the prediction target are spatiotemporal sequences. By extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to have convolutional structures in both the input-to-state and state-to-state transitions, we propose the convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) and use it to build an end-to-end trainable model for the precipitation nowcasting problem. Experiments show that our ConvLSTM network captures spatiotemporal correlations better and consistently outperforms FC-LSTM and the state-of-the-art operational ROVER algorithm for precipitation nowcasting.
Given a sequence of input frames, e.g. sequence of radar echoes, our goal is to predict the most possible sequence of future frames. In paper @cite_4 , ConvLSTM follows Equation 1 to make prediction on Moving MNIST dataset and Hong Kong radar echo dataset. PredRNN enhances the ConvLSTM by using a spatiotemporal flow to further utilize the spatial feature and memorize the temporal information. Following ConvLSTM, PredRNN trains on Moving MNIST dataset and also deals with the precipitation nowcasting problem by training on the HK radar echo data.