Human detection represents a main problem of interest when using video based monitoring. In this paper, artificial neural networks, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) are used to detect humans among different objects in a sequence of frames (images) using classification approach. The classification used is based on the shape of the object instead of depending on the contents of the frame. Initially, background subtraction is depended to extract objects of interest from the frame, then statistical and geometric information are obtained from vertical and horizontal projections of the objects that are detected to stand for the shape of the object. Next to this step, two types of neural networks are used to classify the extracted objects. Tests have been performed on a sequence of frames, and the simulation results by MATLAB showed that the RBF neural network gave a better performance compared with the MLP neural network where the RBF model gave a mean squared error (MSE) equals to 2.36811e-18 against MSE equals to 2.6937e-11 achieved by the MLP model. The more important thing observed is that the RBF approach required less time to classify the detected object as human compared to the MLP, where the RBF took approximately 86.2% lesser time to give the decision.