Background subtraction is an important part of various computer vision applications that can detect the foreground objects by comparing the current pixels with a background model. The general approaches gradually update the background model according to the current status, but might fail in sudden illumination changes. An illumination‐robust background modelling method is proposed to address this problem. The method provides quick illumination compensation using two background models with different adaption rates. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms several state‐of‐art approaches and provides low computational cost.