A system and method for detecting breaklock for correlation trackers. The inventive system includes a first circuit (50) for computing energy E_L in a residual image, a second circuit (52) for computing energy E_I in an input image, and a third circuit (54) for computing a residual metric R_L based on the residual image energy E_L scaled by the input image energy E_I. In the illustrative embodiment, the system further includes a fourth circuit (56) for comparing the residual metric R_L to a threshold T_R, and a fifth circuit (58) for setting a breaklock signal based on the output of the fourth circuit (56).