In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic detection of bike-riders without helmet using surveillance videos in real time. The proposed approach first detects bike riders from surveillance video using background subtraction and object segmentation. Then it determines whether bike-rider is using a helmet or not using visual features and binary classifier. Also, we present a consolidation approach for violation reporting which helps in improving reliability of the proposed approach. In order to evaluate our approach, we have provided a performance comparison of three widely used feature representations namely histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), and local binary patterns (LBP) for classification. The experimental results show detection accuracy of 93.80% on the real world surveillance data. It has also been shown that proposed approach is computationally less expensive and performs in real-time with a processing time of 11.58 ms per frame. © 2016 IEEE.