Aspects of the present invention include systems and methods for segmentation and recognition of action primitives. In embodiments, a framework, referred to as the Continuous Linear Dynamic System (CLDS), comprises two sets of Linear Dynamic System (LDS) models, one to model the dynamics of individual primitive actions and the other to model the transitions between actions. In embodiments, the inference process estimates the best decomposition of the whole sequence into continuous alternating between the two set of models, using an approximate Viterbi algorithm. In this way, both action type and action boundary may be accurately recognized.