Abstract Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC) based visual tracking can give a better and faster tracking performance than traditional sparse representation based tracking methods. However, the existing LLC based methods often use the anchor points near the target to build the sparse coding dictionary for local sparse coding. It may cause a problem that it is hard to discriminate the difference between the negative and positive anchor points in sparse coding dictionary when facing severe background clutter, illumination change and occlusion. In this paper, we propose a context aware sparse coding method to achieve robust visual tracking. The proposed method can prevent the negative anchor points from disturbing the classifier accuracy because it uses a global context regularizer to constrain the sparse coding value of those negative anchor points that are similar to the positive anchor points. Experiment results show that our method can achieve a better tracking performance than state-of-the-art tracking methods do.