In this work, a novel scheme for object detection in complex background scenes has been proposed.The input videos used have ¿xed backgrounds and static cameras. Initially median of few frames is evaluated for obtaining a proper estimate of the background.Local threshold based background subtraction is done for extracting objects from the video sequence.During sudden illumination changes, optical ¿ow analysis is used for motion segmentation.It is assumed that during photometric distortions, the object is in motion.Subsequently shadow detection and suppression is done to the resulting thresholded image. Hue Saturation Value(HSV) color space model is used for shadow suppression.Visual measures convey the performance of the algorithm.