1. A method for identifying a background object in a digital image of a surveillance region, the surveillance region including one or more lighting artifacts, the method comprising: receiving training data that includes characteristics of lighting artifacts pre-classified as background objects from digital images of the surveillance region, wherein the lighting artifacts exhibit a pattern in a plurality of the digital images that includes moving in the surveillance region; training a learning machine with the training data to determine a likelihood that a lighting artifact from a plurality of digital images is a background object; receiving digital images of the surveillance region from a digital surveillance camera; identifying a proto-object in a plurality of the received digital images using a background subtraction method, the proto-object being associated with a lighting artifact in the surveillance region, the background subtraction method preserving boundary details and interior texture details of proto-objects associated with lighting artifacts; determining a plurality of characteristics of the proto-object digital data, the characteristics, individually or in combination, distinguishing a proto-object related to a lighting artifact from its background; and determining by the learning machine a likelihood that the plurality of characteristics is associated with a background object.