In this work, we consider the problem of background pixels information recovering which can be used, for example, in applications concerning segmentation and tracking of components in video images. Shortly, to recover the background of image sequences representing outdoor scenes, we consider a non-parametric morphological leveling operation, which takes into account the specific problem of lighting changes and the fact that we can have both slow and fast motion in the scene. We illustrate the segmentation of players based on the difference between image sequences and the corresponding recovered background representation. We also discuss the reduction of shadows in digital video of soccer games and show the good results of the whole background recovering and segmentation process. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.244363374