Cyber physical system (CPS) is a complex system combining computation, network and physics; object tracking is an important application of CPS. To solve the problem that the traditional kernel correlation filtering tracking algorithm cannot recover the lost object, the authors propose a re‐detection object tracking algorithm. The proposed algorithm mainly designs a new adaptive detection criterion. By comparing the value of detection criterion and the value of the experience threshold, it can be judged whether the current target is lost or not. When the object tracking fails, the proposed method can generate target candidate boxes by using the edge boxes algorithm and select the best target location by applying the non‐maximum suppression and the Euclidean metric methods. In addition, a fast multi‐scale estimation method and an adaptive updating method are added to the tracking procedure to further improve the overall performance of the algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a good performance in terms of precision and success rates.