Techniques are disclosed for creating a background model of a scene using both a pixel based approach and a context based approach. The combined approach provides an effective technique for segmenting scene foreground from background in frames of a video stream. Further, this approach can scale to process large numbers of camera feeds simultaneously, e.g., using parallel processing architectures, while still generating an accurate background model. Further, using both a pixel based approach and context based approach ensures that the video analytics system can effectively and efficiently respond to changes in a scene, without overly increasing computational complexity. In addition, techniques are disclosed for updating the background model, from frame-to-frame, by absorbing foreground pixels into the background model via an absorption window, and dynamically updating background/foreground thresholds.