Robust background subtraction (BS) is essential for high quality foreground detection in most video analytics systems. Recent BS techniques achieve superior detection quality mostly by exploiting the complementary strengths of multiple background models or processing stages. Consequently, these techniques fail to meet the operational requirements of real-time video analytics due to high computational overhead where BS is just the primary processing task. In this paper, we propose a new BS technique, named multi-hypothesis mixture-of-Gaussians (MH-MOG), suitable for real-time video analytics. The essential idea is to maintain a single background model based on perception-aware mixture-of-Gaussians and then, generating multiple detection hypotheses with different processing bases. Finally, only during the detection stage, the complementary strengths of the hypotheses are exploited to achieve superior detection quality without significant computational overhead. Comprehensive experimental evaluation validates the efficacy of MH-MOG. © 2012 IEEE.