In this paper, we present a vision algorithm to extract the tire information markings on the sidewall of tires. Since the appearance of tire marks is the same as its background, a primary feature to distinguish tire marks from their background is the roughness. Generally, the roughness of tire marks is different from that of its bakground: the surface of tire marks is smoother than the backgrounds. Light incident on the tire surface is reflected differently according to the roughness. For smoother surfaces, the surface irradiance is much stronger than that of rough surfaces. Based on these phenomena and observation, we propose an optimal illumination condition based on Torrance-Sparrow reflection model. We also develop an efficient reflectance-ratio based operator to extract the boundary of tire marks. Even with a very simple masking operation, we were able to obtain remarkable boundary extraction results from real experiments using many tires. By explicitly using the surface reflection model to explain the intensity variation on the black tire surface, we demonstrate that a physics-based vision method is powerful and feasible in extracting surface markings on tires.