Moving shadows constitute problems in various applications such as image segmentation and object tracking. Main cause of these problems is the misclassification of the shadow pixels as target pixels. Therefore, the use of an accurate and reliable shadow detection method is essential to realize intelligent video processing applications. In this paper, the cepstrum based method for moving shadow detection is presented. The proposed method is tested on outdoor and indoor video sequences using well-known benchmark test sets. To show the improvements over previous approaches, quantitative metrics are introduced and comparisons based on these metrics are made. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.