A method and apparatus are provided that determine the suitability of an image for use by an object tracking system. According to one embodiment of the present invention an image is preprocessed to separate one or more objects to be tracked from the rest of the image and compute statistics for the one or more objects to be tracked and the rest of the image. A quality measure is generated based on the statistics for the one or more objects to be tracked and the rest of the image that indicates the suitability of the image for use by an object tracking system.