A system and method for human motion recognition are provided. The system includes a video sequence decomposer, a feature extractor, and a motion recognition module. The video sequence decomposer decomposes a video sequence into a plurality of atomic actions. The feature extractor extracts features from each of the plurality of atomic actions, the features including at least a motion feature and a shape feature. And the motion recognition module performs motion recognition for each of the plurality of atomic actions in response to the features.