E-Hafiz: Intelligent System to Help Muslims in Recitation and Memorization of Quran

Recitation of the Holy book of Muslims, The Holy Quran, is a regions duty and hence is done with utmost care such that no mistakes are made while reading it. These mistakes may include the wrong utterance of words, misreading words, and punctuation and pronunciation mistakes. Believers of Islam are spread all over the world and hence there also can be a difference in accent. To avoid this, tajweed rules are implemented to ensure that the utterance is done according to some rules. These rules ensure that there is no variance in the recitation of the Holy book for different reciters. For further improvements, the people are encouraged to memorize the whole book and the person who does that is called a Hafiz. Having known the whole book by heart down to every word with Tajweed rules he/she can a guide to correct other learners who intend to learn by listening to learners and correcting their recitation. But the availability of a Hafiz can be a problem where Islam is not a dominant religion. Furthermore the competency and level of expertise are of epic importance. To get around this problem we have designed and developed a system E-Hafiz. It is based on an idea that Tajweed rules are used to train learners how to recite Quran. To achieve this we used on Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) technique. We extract the features of recorded voices using MFCC and compared with experts’ voices stored in database. Any mismatch on word level is pointed out and ask the user to correct it. [Aslam Muhammad, Zia ul Qayyum, Waqar Mirza M. Saad Tanveer, Martinez-Enriquez A.M., Afraz Z. Syed: EHafiz: Intelligent System to Help Muslims in Recitation and Memorization of Quran. Life Science Journal. 2012;9(1):534-541] (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 80