Professors from the MU College of Engineering are adding a whole new meaning to the phrase “There’s an app for that” with their latest project, a smartphone application used to track military targets for the Army and the United States Department of Defense.

Made possible by funding from the U.S. Army/Leonard Wood Institute, the project uses the power of smart phones to help soldiers locate and detect remote targets. The app relies on the computing and communication aspects of smart phones, as well as their “sensing” capabilities through the camera, GPS, microphone and other components.

“The goal of the project is to find the location of a remote target, through either sound or sight,” computer science professor Yi Shang said in an email. “The state-of-the-art smart phones such as Android phones and iPhones have powerful processors, sensors and wireless communication capabilities, which allow us to write complicated programs that help us accomplish the goal.”

Shang has 10 years of experience working with wireless sensors. Computer science professor Wenjun Zeng and electrical and computer engineering professor Dominic Ho also helped build the app and contributed their expertise in mobile networking and multimedia and signal processing to the project.

Through their combined efforts, these engineers have utilized the abilities of smart phones and made them into to tools for military personnel.

“A user can take a picture of the remote target of interest and the app will give him/her the distance of the target from the phone position and the target’s geographical position,” Zeng said in an email. “The user can also take a short video of the remote moving target, and the app will give the target’s trajectory and velocity/speed.”

The researchers have also developed a way to determine the position of a target that makes some sort of sound, such as a gunshot or a car engine. Using a technique called “time-difference-of-arrival,” the app can localize the target based on sound samples recorded and shared by three phones networked together through an ad-hoc wireless network.

Although the app was mainly developed for use in military operations to position remote targets, the technology is not limited to use by only soldiers. Zeng suggests it could be used in law enforcement to provide detection and evidence of speeding, or even in a consumer market as a way to identify something based on its exact location.

“(The app is) not available to the public at this point,” Zeng said. “But the system is developed on Nexus One smart phones running the Android 2.3.4 operating system. We plan to release it soon when we finalize the system.”