Ancient manuscripts have been preserved by many organizations so as to protect these documents and retrieve traditional knowledge. With the advanced computer technology, digitized media is now commonly used to record these documents. One objective of such work is to develop an efficient image processing system that could be used to retrieve knowledge and information automatically from these ancient manuscripts. Binarization is a preprocessing technique used to extract text and characters from the manuscripts. The output is then used for further processes such as character recognition and knowledge extraction. This paper compares different binarization techniques that could be used for processing of ancient manuscripts. The aim is to improve the binarization techniques with the main objective of developing an automated preprocessing technique for ancient manuscript recognition and knowledge extraction.