Vehicles or pedestrians tracking is an important task in intelligent transportation system. In this paper, we propose an online multi‐object tracking for intelligent traffic platform that employs improved sparse representation and structural constraint. We first build the spatial‐temporal constraint via the geometric relations and appearance of tracked objects, then we construct a robust appearance model by incorporating the discriminative sparse representation with weight constraint and local sparse appearance with occlusion analysis. Finally, we complete data association by using maximum a posteriori in a Bayesian framework in the pursuit for the optimal detection estimation. Experimental results in two challenging vehicle tracking benchmark datasets show that the proposed method has a good tracking performance.