Aspects of a method and system for change detection in localization and tracking of objects in a smart video camera are provided. A programmable surveillance video camera comprises processors for detecting objects in a video signal based on an object mask. The processors may generate a textual representation of the video signal by utilizing a description language to indicate characteristics of the detected objects, such as shape, texture, color, and/or motion, for example. The object mask may be based on a detection field value generated for each pixel in the video signal by comparing a first observation field and a second observation field associated with each of the pixels. The first observation field may be based on a difference between an input video signal value and an estimated background value while the second observation field may be based on a temporal difference between first observation fields.