The rise of virtual instruments has revolutionized music production, providing new avenues for creating music without the need for physical instruments. However, these systems rely on costly hardware, such as MIDI controllers, limiting accessibility. As an alternative, 3D gesture-based virtual instruments have been explored to emulate the immersive experience of MIDI controllers. Yet, these approaches introduce accessibility challenges by requiring specialized hardware, such as depth-sensing cameras and motion sensors. In contrast, 2D gesture systems using RGB cameras are more affordable but often lack extended functionalities. To address these challenges, this study presents a 2D virtual piano system that utilizes hand gesture recognition. The system enables accurate gesture-based control, real-time volume adjustments, control over multiple octaves and instruments, and automatic sheet music generation. OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library, and Google’s MediaPipe are employed for real-time hand tracking. The extracted hand landmark coordinates are normalized based on the wrist and scaled for consistent performance across various RGB camera setups. A bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network is used to evaluate the approach. Experimental results show 95% accuracy on a public Kaggle dynamic gesture dataset and 97% on a custom-designed dataset for virtual piano gestures. Future work will focus on integrating the system with Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), adding advanced musical features, and improving scalability for multiple-player use.

With the proliferation of advanced driver assistance systems and continued advances in autonomous vehicle technology, there is a need for accurate, real-time methods of identifying and interpreting traffic signs. The importance of traffic sign detection can't be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in improving road safety and traffic management. This proposed work suggests a unique real-time traffic sign detection and recognition approach using the YOLOv8 algorithm. Utilizing the integrated webcams of personal computers and laptops, we capture live traffic scenes and train our model using a meticulously curated dataset from Roboflow. Through extensive training, our YOLOv8 version achieves an excellent accuracy rate of 94% compared to YOLOV7 at 90.1% and YOLOv5 at 81.3%, ensuring reliable detection and recognition across various environmental conditions. Additionally, this proposed work introduces an auditory alert feature that notifies the driver with a voice alert upon detecting traffic signs, enhancing driver awareness and safety. Through rigorous experimentation and evaluation, we validate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the importance of utilizing available hardware resources to deploy traffic sign detection systems with minimal infrastructure requirements. Our findings underscore the robustness of YOLOv8 in handling challenging traffic sign recognition tasks, paving the way for widespread adoption of intelligent transportation technologies and fostering the introduction of safer and more efficient road networks. In this paper, we compare the unique model of YOLO with YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8, and find that YOLOv8 outperforms its predecessors, YOLOv7 and YOLOv5, in traffic sign detection with an excellent overall mean average precision of 0.945. Notably, it demonstrates advanced precision and recall, especially in essential sign classes like "No overtaking" and "Stop," making it the favored preference for accurate and dependable traffic sign detection tasks.