The automatic detection of objects that are abandoned or removed in a video scene is an interesting area of computer vision, with key applications in video surveillance. Forgotten or stolen luggage in train and airport stations and irregularly parked vehicles are examples that concern significant issues, such as the fight against terrorism and crime, and public safety. Both issues involve the basic task of detecting static regions in the scene. We address this problem by introducing a model-based framework to segment static foreground objects against moving foreground objects in single view sequences taken from stationary cameras. An image sequence model, obtained by learning in a self-organizing neural network image sequence variations, seen as trajectories of pixels in time, is adopted within the model-based framework. Experimental results on real video sequences and comparisons with existing approaches show the accuracy of the proposed stopped object detection approach.