Wow! The author of TLD, that's quite the honor :). You are right about a lot of the issues we've been facing. However, our focus is squarely on getting tracking results VERY fast, so we can get smooth operation from our controllers. We are working hard to incorporate some global re-detection (and scale), however, we are balancing this with running the algorithm fast online, onboard the drone.

I'd love to talk and bounce more ideas off of you! Ping me, pj(at)perceptivlabs.com