A method for sparse optical flow based tracking in a computer vision system is provided that includes detecting feature points in a frame captured by a monocular camera in the computer vision system to generate a plurality of detected feature points, generating a binary image indicating locations of the detected feature points with a bit value of one, wherein all other locations in the binary image have a bit value of zero, generating another binary image indicating neighborhoods of currently tracked points, wherein locations of the neighborhoods in the binary image have a bit value of zero and all other locations in the binary image have a bit value of one, and performing a binary AND of the two binary images to generate another binary image, wherein locations in the binary image having a bit value of one indicate new feature points detected in the frame.