This paper deals with the background maintenance problem and proposes a novel pixel-wise solution. The proposed backgroud maintenance algorithm is histogram-based. The algorithm has the following main features: fast background initialization, high accuracy in describing the real background and fast reaction to sudden changes. The basic idea of our algorithm is that the pixels are updated only if a statistic measure on the intensity variations of each pixels is greater to an adaptive threshold, thus reducing the I/O channel occupation. Experimental results on dynamic scenes taken from a fixed camera show that the proposed algorithm produces background images with an improved quality with respect to classical pixel-wise algorithms.