License plate binarization method based on fuzzy classification

Many conditions can make it difficult to binarize license-plate image such as nonuniform illumination, degraded license plates and so on. Almost all the threshold-based binarization method did not consider the color feature of gray level license-plate image. According to the color and brightness characteristics, this paper proposes a license plate binarization method based on the fuzzy c-means cluster algorithm using multi-layer classification of the plate. Experimental results show that this algorithm is robust in dealing with nonuniform illumination, degraded license plates. With the proposed method, the recognition rate of the system can be improved significantly.