ABSTRACT This article presents a new colour-texture feature descriptor called opponent colour median-based scale invariant local ternary pattern (OCMD-SILTP) to deal with dynamic backgrounds, similar texture regions, moving cast shadow, and illumination changes. Here, the incoming image frames are first divided into several sub regions and then the colour-texture features are derived by applying OCMD-SILTP on the individual colour planes (R, G, and B) as well as opponent colour planes (R-G, R-B, and G-B). For opponent planes, the median of neighbourhood pixels of one color plane is used for thresholding the neighbourhood pixels of opponent color plane. Because of this, the proposed OCMD-SILTP colour-texture descriptors are more immune to scaling and video noises. The background changes are dynamically updated through OCMD-SILTP texture patterns using histogram intersection method. Experiments on publically available dataset prove the significance of proposed approach under complex environments.