Most video processing applications require object tracking as it is the base operation for real-time implementations such as surveillance, monitoring and video compression. Therefore, accurate tracking of an object under varying scene conditions is crucial for robustness. It is well known that illumination variations on the observed scene and target are an obstacle against robust object tracking causing the tracker lose the target. In this paper, a 2D-cepstrum based approach is proposed to overcome this problem. Cepstral domain features extracted from the target region are introduced into the covariance tracking algorithm and it is experimentally observed that 2D-cepstrum analysis of the target object provides robustness to varying illumination conditions. Another contribution of the paper is the development of the co-difference matrix based object tracking instead of the recently introduced covariance matrix based method. ©2010 IEEE.