Automatic Detection of Some Tajweed Rules
Dahlia Omran Sahar Fawzi
Systems and Biomedical Engineering Information Technology & Computer
Faculty of Engineering, Cairo Science
university Nile university
Giza, Egypt Giza, Egypt
cerona77_omran@hotmail.com sfawzi@nu.edu.eg
Abstract – correct understanding of the Holy Quran is an
essential duty for all Muslims. Tajweed rules guide the reciter to
perform Holy Quran reading exactly as it was uttered by
Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. This work focused on
the recognition of one Quranic recitation rule. Qalqalah rule is
applied to five letters of the Arabic Alphabet
(Baa/Daal/Jeem/Qaaf/Taa) having sukun vowelization. The
proposed system used the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients
(MFCC) as the feature extraction technique, and the
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model was used for
recognition. The available dataset consists of 3322 audio samples
from different surahs of the Quran for four professional readers
(Sheihk) AlHussary, AlMinshawy, Abdel Baset, and Ayman
Swayed. The best results were gained using Ayman Swayed
audio samples with a validation accuracy of 90.8%.
Keywords— Quranic recitation rules, Qalqalah rule, the Mel
Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Convolutional Neural Networks
(CNN)
I. INTRODUCTION
The Holy Quran is the main source of guidance for all
Muslims. Delivering the precise meaning of the holy Quran
words is a very crucial issue. Although the holy Quran is
presented in classic Arabic, it is completely different from
any other Arabic content. For an accurate reading of the holy
Quran, recitation rules must be followed. These rules also
called Tajweed rules, apply certain pronunciation manners,
articulation positions, and intonation characteristics for
letters in specific situations. These rules include merging two
letters’ sounds, applying high stress when pronouncing a
letter, prolonged letter pronunciation for a specific duration,
and many more rules [1]. Tajweed rules are hard to localize
and to be applied, especially for non-Arabic speakers [2].
Teaching Tajweed rules may be considered a complicated
and confusing task. It needs prolonged sessions of direct
contact between the instructor and his/her students. Tajweed
rules should be applied to deliver the correct
pronunciation/meaning of the Quran and consequently to
maintain its integrity and authenticity [3].
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an interactive
process of recognition of human spoken words by machines
based on the embedded information in those words [4-5].
ASR enables the machine to receive, interpret and translate
audio signals (words or orders) and react accordingly [6].
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are promising and
efficient techniques used for ASR [7]. DNN has profoundly
revolutionized the field of speech recognition by applying
different kinds of models such as Recurrent Neural Networks
(RNN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and
transform networks [8].
CNN showed promising results in pattern recognition and
prediction so they are used to detect and allocate different
979-8-3503-0030-7/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE
Ahmed Kandil
Systems and Biomedical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Cairo
university
Giza, Egypt
ahkandil@eng1.cu.edu.eg
patterns [9-10]. CNN proved reliability in handling speech
signals and improving the speaker invariance of the acoustic
model [11].
The main objective of our research is to construct a
Quranic recitation rule detection system. which is the
Qalqalah rule. CNN was used as the speech recognition
model. The proposed system should help read Quran verses
correctly, especially for readers with limited knowledge of
Tajweed rules and non-Arabic speakers.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Alagrami et al. [1] worked on four Tajweed rules
(Edgham Meem, Ekhfaa Meem, Tafkheem Lam, Tarqeeq
Lam). The used dataset contained a total of 657 recordings.
All audio segmentations were manually performed with an
average sample duration of 4 seconds. The applied feature
extraction technique basically employs 70 filter banks as the
main method. Support Vector Machine (SVM) was adopted
for Classification. In the test stage, every model of the system
used 30% of the data and the validation accuracy was 99%.
Damer N.A. et al [12], considered eight Tajweed rules and
conducted several feature extraction techniques such as Mel-
Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Wavelet Packet
Decomposition (WPD), and Linear Predictive Code (LPC).
Different classification techniques were used such as k-
Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM),
and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks. They
concluded that MFCC achieved the highest accuracy in the
feature extraction phase and SVM scored the highest
classification accuracy of 94.4%. This was obtained when all
features except for the LPC features were applied to SVM.
Hassan et.al [13] created a system for Holy Quran's
Tajweed rules recognition using sphinx tools. In the proposed
system, the MFCC technique was used to find the most
informative audio features and Hidden Markov Model
(HMM) was used for classification. The system scored 85-
90% accuracy when tested with a small chapter of the Quran.
E-Hafiz system was created in [14] to help ordinary
readers to recite Quran correctly by training them on Tajweed
rules depending on expert readers. The (MFCC) technique
was applied to extract the features of recorded voices of
specific verses. These features were used to build a model of
speech recognition using Vector Quantization (VQ). This
model was used to compare readers’ trials against experts’
reference readings. Any mismatch on the word level was
highlighted.
 Another speech recognition system for Tajweed Rule
Checking was proposed using Vector Quantization (MFCC-
VQ), and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient hybrid
algorithm [15]. The system performance was tested using
Qalqalah phonemes. The result for hybrid MFCC-VQ when
tested against the original MFCC recoded 86.928%,
90.495%, and 64.683% real-time factor improvement for
males, females, and children respectively.
Mahdy et al., [16] developed a speech-enabled Computer-
Aided Pronunciation Learning system named HAFSS which
is used in teaching the holy Quran recitation. A classification
algorithm was implemented testing the duration of phoneme
for recitation errors' detection related to phoneme durations.
The system accuracy was 62.4% measured as pronunciation
errors, 22.4% "Repeat Request" was issued, and 14.9% false
acceptance of total errors.
III.METHODOLOGY
The main stages conducted through this research to
reach our objectives are represented in Fig.1
Data Data Feature Recognition
Acquiring Preprocessing Extraction Model
Fig.1 The proposed system block diagram
A. Dataset Preparation
The basic step in our work is acquiring an adequate
number of high-quality audio signals to build our reference
dataset.
Mushaf Tajweed was used to allocate verses with the needed
Tajweed rule. Mushaf Tajweed is a printed version of the holy
Quran that highlights Tajweed rules with certain colors (color-
coded rules).
Samples were acquired from records of the professional
reciters AlHussary, Ayman Swaied, AlMenshawy, and Abdel
baset. All these records follow the narration of Hafss on the
authority of Asim. The composed dataset consists of 3322
samples of different readers. Each reader was denoted a
certain ID number as represented in table 1.
TABLE I. DATASET COMPONENTS ACCORDING TO READER (SHEIHK)
Readers’ ID
Number of Samples Records of Sheihk
Number
1 653 AlHussary
2 1432 Ayman Swayed
3 633 AlMinshawy
4 604 Adbel Baset
Samples’ characteristics:
1. Qalqalah letters samples were spotted manually using
oceanaudio 8.3.
2. Each Sample was set to have equal durations to ensure
capturing all sound characteristics and articulation.
3. Fixed pre and post edges were added to each of the
sample so the core information of the sample is gained,
centralized and preserved during the training phase.
4. Samples were collected from stereo audio files, with
22050 Hz sampling rate.
5. In addition to the five sets of Qalqalah letters, there is a
sixth set named No contains a dataset of the set of
Qalqalah letters but without the Qalqalah characteristics.
B. Data Pre-processing
Samples must be preprocessed to be used by the model.
• Convert all audio samples into the Comma-Separated
Values (CSV) files form.
• Convert all audio samples from .mp3 form to .wav form.
• The stereo channels of all dataset files to be averaged and
saved as a single channel audio mono.
C. Features Extraction
Features were mainly extracted as Mel-Frequency
Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and their derivatives. Twelve
MFCC were obtained, delta, delta-delta were also obtained
and added to the features set and the energy of the signal
sample. The features generated from each audio signal sample
was used as one input for the speech recognition model [17].
The dataset shall be divided into training and testing sets
with a (80:20) ratio [18-20].
D. The Recognition Model
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) deep learning
model was built and used for recognition of the required rule.
The model is constructed using 4 layers, each of them
consists of a convolutional layer which include two
operations linear operation (convolution) and non-linear
operation (activation), followed by a pooling layer. By the
end of the fourth layer, a global average pooling layer (flatten
layer) and finally a fully connected dense layer [21].
Convolutional Neural Network layout is represented in Fig.2
Fig. 2. Convolutional Neural Networks layout [22]
• Convolutional Neural Networks Model
CNN architecture has the highest performance when
manipulating two-dimensional data such as images, that is
why all used audio signals are reshaped lnto 2D form [23].
Sixteen filters are used by first convolutional layer, the
second one uses 32 filter, 64 filters are used by the third
one and the fourth layer uses 128 filters. Filters in all four
convolutional layers are of size 2. In all four layers, the
used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit
(ReLU) [21].
• Pooling layer
It involves using a 2D size 2 Max-pooling filter sliding Reader’s ID
over each feature map. Max-pooling involves considering Accuracy
1 2 3 4
each patch maximum value and discarding other values
√ √ 0.856
[11].
• The Dropout is set to 0.2 in all layers, to prevent the √ √ 0.740
overfitting [24]. √ √ 0.818
• Flatten layer √ √ 0.766
Before the final layer, a flatten layer is created using the √ √ 0.893
global average pooling that extremely down sample the √ √ 0.726
feature map to one dimension array by obtaining each
feature map elements’ average [21].
• Dense layer TABLE 5. RESULTS USING SAMPLES OF THREE RECITERS
It is a fully connected layer in which all inputs are
connected to all outputs and it is the final layer of the
model, it uses a soft-max activation function [25-26] Reader’s ID Accuracy

IV RESULTS 1 2 3 4
√ √ √ 0.790
Several experiments were conducted representing different √ √ √ 0.796
combinations of reciters’ samples. Six classes are used to √ √ √ 0.771
represent the five Qalqalah letters and the absence of Qalqalah √ √ √ 0.855
case. The highlighted raw in each table represents the highest
validation accuracy TABLE 6. RESULTS USING SAMPLES OF FOUR RECITERS

The first experiment was conducted by training the model Reader’s ID Accuracy
with combined audio samples of the four reciters and testing 1 2 3 4
the model with one, two, three of four reciters’ samples. Table √ √ √ √ 0.811
2 represents the results of the first experiment.

TABLE 2. TESTING WITH DIFFERENT RECITERS’ COMBINATIONS Table 7 introduces a comparison between the obtained results
and the results of Ismail et al. [15].

MFCC-VQ Approach Our Proposed Work

Reader’s ID Accuracy
1 2 3 4 Features
√ 0.84 Extraction MFCC-VQ MFCC
Techniques
√ √ 0.89
√ √ 0.75 Classification
Codebook
Convolutional Neural
Model Network
√ √ 0.78
√ √ √ 0.85 45 speakers (20 males - Four professional
Dataset 20 females -5 children) reciters
√ √ √ √ 0.78 1750 samples 3322 samples
description
A sequence of experiments was conducted by including Surah Al-Ikhlas and 10 Most holy Quran
Qalqalah phoneme Surahs
different combinations of reciters’ samples for training and
testing. Table 3 to 5 represent the results these experiments. 87%, 90.5%, and 64.7%
Accuracy for males, females, and 85 – 91%
children respectively
TABLE 3. RESULTS USING THE SAMPLES OF ONE RECITER
V. DISCUSSION
Reader’s ID Accuracy
In the case of training the model by samples of the four
1 2 3 4
reciters, the best accuracy of 89% was acquired when testing
√ 0.83 with Sheihk AlHussary and Sheihk Ayman Swayed samples.
√ 0.908
While using the same reciter samples for training and testing,
√ 0.68
the highest accuracy of 90.8% was obtained with Sheihk
√ 0.88
Ayman Swayed.
Using samples of two reciters, the highest accuracy of 89.3%
was acquired with the combination of Sheihk Ayman Swayed
and Sheihk Abdel Bast samples.

In the case of combining the samples of three reciters the

TABLE 4. RESULTS USING SAMPLES OF TWO RECITERS highest accuracy was 85.5% gained with samples of
AlHussary, Ayman Swaeied, and Abdel Bast. Using the
sample for all four reciters, the accuracy reached 81.1%.
Comparing the results obtained with the closest previous
research conducted by Ismail et al. [15], the proposed model
results were superior even though the dataset covers the
different Qalqalah rule through the whole Holy Quran.
VI. CONCLUSION
The results show the ability of the CNN to recognize the
Qalqalah pattern in different verse and surahs of the holy
Quran with promising accuracy. Increasing the number of
training samples may result in better accuracy.
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