Based on background difference and level set, a novel segmentation method was presented for multiple moving targets in static camera surveillance. Firstly, background pixels in current frame were obtained by calculating symmetric difference of three consecutive frames, and the gray value of every background pixel was recorded. Then the gray value with the biggest frequency was selected for each pixel to reconstruct whole background. Secondly, the region growth algorithm based on the 8-neighbour search was proposed to detect connected regions, and small background noise regions were removed by setting a threshold. Then by analyzing connected regions, moving target regions were marked. Finally, the level set algorithm without re-initialization was adopted to segment each target region. The closed and entire target contour was gotten. Experiments show that this approach can realize automatic detection and contour segmentation of rigid or non-rigid moving targets in static camera surveillance.