This paper introduces a system for video object extraction useful for general applications where foreground objects move within a slow changing background. Surveillance of indoor and outdoor sequences is a typical example. The originality of the approach resides in two related components. First, the statistical change detection used in the system does not require any sophisticated parametric tuning as it is based on a probabilistic method. Second, the change is detected between a current instance of the scene and a reference that is updated continuously to take into account slow variation of the background. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs well in extracting video objects, with stability and good accuracy, while being of relative reduced complexity.