Abstract Background modeling and subtraction is an essential task in video surveillance applications. Most traditional studies use information observed in past frames to create and update a background model. To adapt to background changes, the background model has been enhanced by introducing various forms of information including spatial consistency and temporal tendency. In this paper, we propose a new framework that leverages information from a future period. Our proposed approach realizes a low-cost and highly accurate background model. The proposed framework is called bidirectional background modeling, and performs background subtraction based on bidirectional analysis; i.e., analysis from past to present and analysis from future to present. Although a result will be output with some delay because information is taken from a future period, our proposed approach improves the accuracy by about 30% if only a 33-millisecond of delay is acceptable. Furthermore, the memory cost can be reduced by about 65% relative to typical background modeling.