An apparatus and method for human activity and facial expression modeling and recognition are based on feature extraction techniques from time sequential images. The human activity modeling includes determining principal components of depth and/or binary shape images of human activities extracted from video clips. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) representations are determined based on the principal components. Features are determined through Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) based on the ICA representations. A codebook is determined using vector quantization, Observation symbol sequences in the video clips am determined. And human activities are learned using the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based on status transition and an observation matrix.