Tracking moving objects in video sequence is an important problem in computer vision, with applications several fields, such as video surveillance and target tracking. Most techniques reported in the literature use background subtraction techniques to obtain foreground objects, and apply shadow detection algorithms exploring spectral information of the images to retrieve only valid moving objects. In this paper, we propose a small improvement to an existing background model, and incorporate a novel technique for shadow detection in grayscale video sequences. The proposed algorithm works well for both indoor and outdoor sequences, and does not require the use of color cameras.