A method is provided for drone-video-based action recognition. The method learns a transformation for each of target video clips taken from a set of target videos, responsive to original features extracted from the target video clips. The transformation corrects differences between a target drone domain corresponding to the target video clips and a source non-drone domain corresponding to source video clips taken from a set of source videos. The method adapts the target to the source domain by applying the transformation to the original features to obtain transformed features for the target video clips. The method converts the original and transformed features of same ones of the target video clips into a single classification feature for each of the target videos. The method classifies a human action in a new target video relative to the set of source videos using the single classification feature for each of the target videos.