Object tracking is one of important steps to achieve video-based surveillance systems. Object tracking is considered as an essential task similar to object detection and recognition. In order to perform object tracking, various machine learning methods (e.g., least-squares, perceptron and support vector machine) can be applied for different designs of tracking systems. In general, generative methods (e.g., principal component analysis) were utilized due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, the generative methods were only focused on modeling the target object. Due to this limitation, discriminative methods (e.g., binary classification) were adopted to distinguish the target object and the background. Among the machine learning methods for binary classification, total error rate minimization can be used as one of successful machine learning methods for binary classification. The total error rate minimization can achieve a global minimum due to a quadratic approximation to a step function while other methods (e.g., support vector machine) seek local minima using nonlinear functions (e.g., hinge loss function). Due to this quadratic approximation, the total error rate minimization could obtain appropriate properties in solving optimization problems for binary classification. However, this total error rate minimization was based on a batch mode setting. The batch mode setting can be limited to several applications under offline learning. Due to limited computing resources, offline learning could not handle large scale data sets. Compared to offline learning, online learning can update its solution without storing all training samples in learning process. Due to increment of large scale data sets, online learning becomes one of essential properties for various applications. Since object tracking needs to handle data samples in real time, online learning based total error rate minimization methods are necessary to efficiently address object tracking problems. Due to the need of the online learning, an online learning based total error rate minimization method was developed. However, an approximately reweighted technique was developed. Although the approximation technique is utilized, this online version of the total error rate minimization could achieve good performances in biometric applications. However, this method is assumed that the total error rate minimization can be asymptotically achieved when only the number of training samples is infinite. Although there is the assumption to achieve the total error rate minimization, the approximation issue can continuously accumulate learning errors according to increment of training samples. Due to this reason, the approximated online learning solution can then lead a wrong solution. The wrong solution can make significant errors when it is applied to surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose an exactly reweighted technique to recursively update the solution of the total error rate minimization in online learning manner. Compared to the approximately reweighted online total error rate minimization, an exactly reweighted online total error rate minimization is achieved. The proposed exact online learning method based on the total error rate minimization is then applied to object tracking problems. In our object tracking system, particle filtering is adopted. In particle filtering, our observation model is consisted of both generative and discriminative methods to leverage the advantages between generative and discriminative properties. In our experiments, our proposed object tracking system achieves promising performances on 8 public video sequences over competing object tracking systems. The paired t-test is also reported to evaluate its quality of the results. Our proposed online learning method can be extended under the deep learning architecture which can cover the shallow and deep networks. Moreover, online learning methods, that need the exact reweighting process, can use our proposed reweighting technique. In addition to object tracking, the proposed online learning method can be easily applied to object detection and recognition. Therefore, our proposed methods can contribute to online learning community and object tracking, detection and recognition communities.