# TIGeR: A Unified Framework for Time, Images and Geo-location Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24749 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24749/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [GeoCLIP: Clip-Inspired Alignment between Locations and Images for Effective Worldwide Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16020/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03084/) (2023)
- [SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17179/) (2023)
- [Where am I looking at? Joint Location and Orientation Estimation by Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03860/) (2020)
- [PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05314/) (2016)
- [Presence-Only Geographical Priors for Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05272/) (2019)
- [R2Former: Unified Retrieval and Reranking Transformer for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03410/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11045/) (2019)
- [Revisiting IM2GPS in the Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04838/) (2017)
- [Everything at Once -- Multi-modal Fusion Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04446/) (2021)
- [CSP: Self-Supervised Contrastive Spatial Pre-Training for Geospatial-Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01118/) (2023)
- [MegaLoc: One Retrieval to Place Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17237/) (2025)
- [Where in the World is this Image? Transformer-based Geo-localization in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13861/) (2022)
- [PIGEON: Predicting Image Geolocations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05845/) (2023)
- [OpenStreetView-5M: The Many Roads to Global Visual Geolocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18873/) (2024)
- [Img2Loc: Revisiting Image Geolocalization using Multi-modality Foundation Models and Image-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19584/) (2024)
- [Learning a Dynamic Map of Visual Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14885/) (2020)
- [Mind the Modality Gap: Towards a Remote Sensing Vision-Language Model via Cross-modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09816/) (2024)
- [Preserving Modality Structure Improves Multi-Modal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13077/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Earth Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03410/) (2026)
- [Pixel-wise Geo-registration of Drone and Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28891/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many real-world applications in digital forensics, urban monitoring, and environmental analysis require jointly reasoning about visual appearance, location, and time. Beyond standard geo-localization and time-of-capture prediction, these applications increasingly demand more complex capabilities, such as retrieving an image captured at the same location as a query image but at a specified target time. We formalize this problem as Geo-Time Aware Image Retrieval and propose TIGeR, a unified framework for Time, Images and Geo-location Retrieval. TIGeR supports flexible input configurations (single-modality and multi-modality queries) and uses the same representation to perform (i) geo-localization, (ii) time-of-capture prediction, and (iii) geo-time-aware retrieval. By preserving the underlying location identity despite large appearance changes, TIGeR enables retrieval based on where and when a scene was captured, rather than purely on visual similarity. To support this task, we design a multistage data curation pipeline and propose a new diverse dataset of 4.5M paired image-location-time triplets for training and 86k high-quality triplets for evaluation. Extensive experiments show that TIGeR consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods by up to 16% on time-of-year, 8% time-of-day prediction, and 14% in geo-time aware retrieval recall, highlighting the benefits of unified geo-temporal modeling.