The present invention provides a foreground action estimating apparatus and a foreground action estimating method, wherein the foreground action estimating apparatus includes: a training image inputting means for inputting a foreground image, a background image and an image having the foreground and background images as training images; a basis matrix calculating means for calculating a foreground basis matrix and a background basis matrix by respectively extracting a foreground feature and a background feature from the foreground image and the background image, respectively, and combining the foreground basis matrix and the background basis matrix to obtain a combined basis matrix; a feature suppressing means for calculating the feature coefficients of the training images in accordance with the combined basis matrix obtained by the basis matrix calculating means so as to obtain image features of the background-feature-suppressed training images; and a foreground action information acquiring means for estimating foreground action information in accordance with a feature mapping matrix from the image feature to an action information set, by using the background-feature-suppressed image features.