• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.9-17
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• 2009

License plate recognition is an active research area. but few comparative studies on license plate binarization have been conducted. Many related researchers have experienced similar trial and error for finding an effective binarization method. To reduce this trial and error, this study implemented some binarization methods and quantitatively compared the performance of the methods. The performance evaluation consists of a low level measure and a high level measure, so it can evaluate not only the quality of binarized image itself but also the usefulness of the result. The performance evaluation was separately performed with three groups of images so as to understand the properties of the binarization methods. Experimental results show that the quality of binarization is more dependent on the evenness of illumination than the intensity of illumination. The Otsu's method has acquired the most effective performance in the group of even illumination images and the Niblack's method with parameter correction has shown the best quality in the group of uneven illumination images.