This paper deals with a binarization for plate number recognition. The binarization process converts an image into a binary image and plays an important role for automatically recognizing plate number. The rear license plate has often a shadowed image which causes erroneous binarized image due to non-uniform illumination. In this paper, a binarization method is proposed in which the shadow line is detected in a rear plate with a shadow. And then the histogram matching is conducted for the two image separated by the shadow line. After histogram matching, two images are joined and finally Otsu method is applied for the binarization. In the experiment, the proposed algorithm shows robust performance compared to the conventional method in the presence of estimation error in the shadow line.