Fall event detection is one of the most common problems for elderly people, especially those living alone because falls result in serious injuries such as joint dislocations, fractures, severe head injuries or even death. In order to prevent falls or fall-related injuries, several previous methods based on video sensor showed low fall detection rates in recent years. To improve this problem and outperform the system performance, this paper presented a novel approach for fall event detection in the elderly using a subtraction between successive difference images and temporal templates in real time environment. The proposed algorithm obtained the successful detection rate of 96.43% and the low false positive rate of 3.125% even though the low-quality video sequences are obtained by a USB PC camera sensor. The experimental results have shown very promising performance in terms of high detection rate and low false positive rate.