Abstract Visual target tracking is a long-standing problem in the domain of computer vision. There are numerous methods proposed over several years. A recent trend in visual tracking has been target representation and tracking using saliency models inspired by the attentive mechanism of the human. Motivated to investigate the usefulness of such target representation scheme, we study several target representation techniques for mean-shift tracking framework, where the feature space can include color, texture, saliency, and gradient orientation information. In particular, we study the usefulness of the joint distribution of color-texture, color-saliency, and color-orientation in comparison with the color distribution. The performance is evaluated using the visual object tracking (VOT) 2013 which provides a systematic mechanism and a database for the assessment of tracking algorithms. We summarize the results in terms of accuracy and robustness; and discuss the usefulness of saliency-based target t racking.