Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Binarization of License Plate Images

Unlike document images, license plate images are mostly captured under uneven lighting conditions. In particular, a shadowed region has sharp intensity variation and sometimes that region has very high intensity by reflected light. This paper presents a new technique for thresholding license plate images. This approach consists of three parts. In the first part, it performs a rough thresholding and classifies the type of license plate to adjust some parameters optimally. Next, it identifies a shadow type and binarizes license plate images by adjusting the window size and location according to the shadow type. And finally, post-processing based on the cluster analysis is performed. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed five well-known methods.