1. A system for parametric background modeling in a computer vision system for enabling foreground object detection, comprising: a video acquisition module for receiving video data from a sequence of frames acquired from an associated image capture device monitoring a scene of interest; a fit test module for identifying the pixels associated with the foreground object from the video data where the identified pixels define a foreground mask representative of the identified foreground object; and a foreground-aware background estimation module for maintaining a parametric background model and updating the background model using an association of a current frame and the foreground mask to produce an updated background model.