Foreground detection methods can be applied to efficiently distinguish foreground objects including moving or static objects from background which is very important in the application of video analysis, especially video surveillance. An excellent background model can obtain a good foreground detection results. A lot of background modeling methods had been proposed, but few comprehensive evaluations of them are available. These methods suffer from various challenges such as illumination changes and dynamic background. This paper first analyzed advantages and disadvantages of various background modeling methods in video analysis applications and then compared their performance in terms of quality and the computational cost. The Change detection.Net (CDnet2014) dataset and another video dataset with different environmental conditions (indoor, outdoor, snow) were used to test each method. The experimental results sufficiently demonstrated the strengths and drawbacks of traditional and recently proposed state-of-the-art background modeling methods. This work is helpful for both researchers and engineering practitioners. Codes of background modeling methods evaluated in this paper are available at www.yongxu.org/lunwen.html.