Techniques are disclosed for matching a current background scene of an image received by a surveillance system with a gallery of scene presets that each represent a previously captured background scene. A quadtree decomposition analysis is used to improve the robustness of the matching operation when the scene lighting changes (including portions containing over-saturation/under-saturation) or a portion of the content changes. The current background scene is processed to generate a quadtree decomposition including a plurality of window portions. Each of the window portions is processed to generate a plurality of phase spectra. The phase spectra are then projected onto a corresponding plurality of scene preset image matrices of one or more scene preset. When a match between the current background scene and one of the scene presets is identified, the matched scene preset is updated. Otherwise a new scene preset is created based on the current background scene.