Visual tracking technology can provide measurement information for unmanned helicopter formation and thus, more attention is being paid to this research area. We propose a novel mean shift(MS) algorithm that is both adaptive and robust for unmanned helicopter formation and apply it to the leading unmanned helicopter tracking. The movement of an unmanned helicopter is very flexible and changeable, which makes the tracking there of more difficulty than for common targets. In creating an algorithm that can adapt to the acceleration of the unmanned helicopter and estimates both the scale and orientation of the movement changes, we combine the traditional MS with the bio-inspired Cauchy predator-prey biogeography-based optimization(CPPBBO)evolutionary algorithm, and also the space variant resolution(SVR) mechanism of the human visual system(MS-CPPBBO-SVR). To demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method and justify the importance of the CPPBBO algorithm and SVR mechanism at the same time, a series of comparative experiments were carried out. The experimental results of the proposed MS-CPPBBO-SVR method are compared with other competitive tracking methods, such as MS, MS with SVR(MS-SVR), MS-SVR with several other optimization algorithms, and the robust particle filter algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed tracking approach, MS-CPPBBO-SVR, is more adaptive, robust and efficient in target tracking than the other methods. Visual tracking technology can provide measurement information for unmanned helicopter formation and thus, more attention is being paid to this research area. We propose a novel mean shift (MS) algorithm that is both adaptive and robust for unmanned helicopter formation and apply it to the leading The movement of an unmanned helicopter is very flexible and changeable, which makes the tracking there is more difficulty than for common targets. In creating an algorithm that can adapt to the acceleration of the unmanned helicopter and both both the scale and orientation of the movement changes, we combine the traditional MS with the bio-inspired Cauchy predator-prey biogeography-based optimization (CPPBBO) evolutionary algorithm, and also the space variant resolution (SVR) mechanism of the human visual system (MS-CPPBBO- SVR To demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method and justify the importance of the CPPBBO algorithm and SVR mechanization The experimental results of the proposed MS-CPPBBO-SVR method are compared with other competitive tracking methods, such as MS, MS with SVR (MS-SVR), MS- The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed tracking approach, MS-CPPBBO-SVR, is more adaptive, robust and efficient in target tracking than the other methods.