In this paper, a novel text binarization is presented that can deal with some complex conditions, such as shadows, non-uniform illumination due to highlight or object projection, and messy backgrounds. To locate the target text region, a focus line is assumed to pass through a text region. Next, connected component analysis and stroke width estimation based on location information of the focus line is used to locate the bounding box of the text region, and each box of connected components. A series of classifications are applied to identify whether each CC(Connected component) is text or non-text. Also, a modified K-means clustering method based on an HCL color space is applied to reduce the color dimension. A text binarization procedure based on location of text component and seed color pixel is then used to generate the final result.