The development in ocean exploration and observation make the demand for moving object detection in underwater increasingly urgent. The moving object detection in underwater with dynamic or moving background is the challenging and difficult task for the researchers. In dynamic environment, foreground object as well as background of the scene both are in motion condition, thus it is very difficult to detect foreground moving object in underwater medium. In proposed work, background is categorized into three types i.e. static, moderate dynamic and high dynamic backgrounds. The GMG algorithm invented by Andrew B. Godbehere, Akihiro Matsukawa, Ken Goldberg is implemented to detect moving object and compare the results for the three background categories. The sensitivity and accuracy parameter values are considered for the comparison of the results. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.