Disclosed is a method and apparatus for adaptive tracking of a target object. The method includes method of tracking an object, the method including estimating a dynamic characteristic of an object in an input image based on frames of the input image, determining a size of a crop region for a current frame of the input image based on the dynamic characteristic of the object, generating a cropped image by cropping the current frame based on the size of the crop region, and generating a result of tracking the object for the current frame using the cropped image.