Quran Recitation Recognition using End-to-End Deep Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces an end-to-end deep learning model for automatic Quran recitation recognition, achieving promising accuracy on a new public dataset, and aims to establish a baseline for future research in this domain.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel CNN-Bidirectional GRU model with CTC and beam search decoding for Quran recitation recognition, utilizing a large public dataset for evaluation.

Findings

Achieved 8.34% WER and 2.42% CER on the Ar-DAD dataset.

Proposed model outperforms previous approaches on this dataset.

Provides a baseline for future Quran recitation recognition research.

Abstract

The Quran is the holy scripture of Islam, and its recitation is an important aspect of the religion. Recognizing the recitation of the Holy Quran automatically is a challenging task due to its unique rules that are not applied in normal speaking speeches. A lot of research has been done in this domain, but previous works have detected recitation errors as a classification task or used traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we proposed a novel end-to-end deep learning model for recognizing the recitation of the Holy Quran. The proposed model is a CNN-Bidirectional GRU encoder that uses CTC as an objective function, and a character-based decoder which is a beam search decoder. Moreover, all previous works were done on small private datasets consisting of short verses and a few chapters of the Holy Quran. As a result of using private datasets, no comparisons were done. To overcome this issue, we used a public dataset that has recently been published (Ar-DAD) and contains about 37 chapters that were recited by 30 reciters, with different recitation speeds and different types of pronunciation rules. The proposed model performance was evaluated using the most common evaluation metrics in speech recognition, word error rate (WER), and character error rate (CER). The results were 8.34% WER and 2.42% CER. We hope this research will be a baseline for comparisons with future research on this public new dataset (Ar-DAD).