The disclosure is directed to techniques for automatic segmentation of a region-of-interest (ROI) video object from a video sequence. ROI object segmentation enables selected ROI or “foreground” objects of a video sequence that may be of interest to a viewer to be extracted from non-ROI or “background” areas of the video sequence. Examples of a ROI object are a human face or a head and shoulder area of a human body. The disclosed techniques include a hybrid technique that combines ROI feature detection, region segmentation, and background subtraction. In this way, the disclosed techniques may provide accurate foreground object generation and low-complexity extraction of the foreground object from the video sequence. A ROI object segmentation system may implement the techniques described herein. In addition, ROI object segmentation may be useful in a wide range of multimedia applications that utilize video sequences, such as video telephony applications and video surveillance applications.