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

TL;DR

TIGeR is a unified framework that enables joint reasoning about visual appearance, location, and time for image retrieval, supporting complex queries involving spatial and temporal constraints.

Contribution

The paper introduces TIGeR, a novel unified model for geo-temporal image retrieval, along with a large dataset of 4.5 million triplets for training and evaluation.

Findings

TIGeR outperforms baselines by up to 16% in time-of-year prediction.

TIGeR improves time-of-day prediction accuracy by 8%.

TIGeR achieves 14% higher recall in geo-time aware retrieval.

Abstract

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.