With the advent of new applications in cardiac robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS), a demand for the design of efficient motion compensation systems was created. In this context, vision-based techniques seem to be a practical way to retrieve the motion of the beating heart since they do not require the introduction of additional sensors in the limited workspace. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for tracking the heart surface which incorporates two novelties. The first is a thin-plate splines (TPS) parametric model for the heart surface deformation that allows us to better track regions of the heart surface with little texture information which undergo large non-rigid deformations. The second novelty is the incorporation of a performing illumination compensation algorithm to cope with arbitrary illumination changes and increase tracking robustness.We also extend this framework for 3D tracking, to enable full compensation of the heart motion. Extensive experiments conducted on in-vivo and ex-vivo heart images attest the notable performance of the algorithm.