This paper presents a family of algorithms based on sparse decompositions that detect anomalies in video sequences obtained from slow moving cameras. These algorithms start by computing the union of subspaces that best represents all the frames from a reference (anomaly free) video as a low-rank projection plus a sparse residue. Then, they perform a low-rank representation of a target (possibly anomalous) video by taking advantage of both the union of subspaces and the sparse residue computed from the reference video. Such algorithms provide good detection results while at the same time obviating the need for previous video synchronization. However, this is obtained at the cost of a large computational complexity, which hinders their applicability. Another contribution of this paper approaches this problem by using intrinsic properties of the obtained data representation in order to restrict the search space to the most relevant subspaces, providing computational complexity gains of up to two orders of magnitude. The developed algorithms are shown to cope well with videos acquired in challenging scenarios, as verified by the analysis of 59 videos from the VDAO database that comprises videos with abandoned objects in a cluttered industrial scenario.},