Real-time background modeling based on a multi-level texture description

•The proposed background modeling can tolerate illumination changes and shadows.•The proposed multilevel texture description can model the background more accurate.•The proposed method is suitable for real-time applications with desired detection results.

Background construction is the base of object detection and tracking of machine vision systems. Traditional background modeling methods often require complicated computations and are sensitive to illumination changes. This paper proposes a novel block-based background modeling method based on a hierarchical coarse-to-fine texture description, which fully utilizes the texture characteristics of each incoming frame. The proposed method is efficient and can resist both illumination changes and shadow disturbance. The experimental results show that this method is suitable for real-world scenes and real-time applications.