The target tracking algorithm based on compressive sensing can cause the instability or failure in the tracking process when the illumination changes drastically.To deal with such problem , a developed tracking algorithm based on phase congruency was proposed,which is insensitive to the illumination.The phase congruency transformation of the image in the search area is calculated firstly, then the features extracted from the transformed image are used in the classifier to determine the target′s location.Experimental results show that the proposed method has a strong adaptability when the target has a drastic variation in the illumination, and the average frame rate can reach 22 fps when the target size is 50 pixel×55 pixel.Compared with the tracking algorithm based on compressive sensing, the proposed algorithm still has a very good robustness to the drastic variation of the target′s illumination.Besides, to a certain extent, the tracking is also stable to scale and textures change.