Monitoring and forecasting of road traffic conditions is a common practice for real traffic information system, and is of vital importance to traffic management and control. While dynamic traffic patterns can be intuitively represented by space-time diagrams, this study proposes a new concept of space-time image (ST-image) to incorporate physical meanings of traffic state variables. We therefore transform the forecasting problem for time-series traffic states into a conditional image generation problem. We explore the inherent properties of the ST images from the perspectives of physical meaning and traffic dynamics. An innovative deep learning based architecture is designed to process the ST-image, and a diffusion model is trained to obtain traffic forecasts by generating the future ST-images based on the historical patterns.