  Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video
analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting
the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos
are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present
state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict
human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two
tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their
explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual surveillance,
autonomous driving vehicle, entertainment, and video retrieval, etc. Many
attempts have been devoted in the last a few decades in order to build a robust
and effective framework for action recognition and prediction. In this paper,
we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in action recognition and
prediction. Existing models, popular algorithms, technical difficulties,
popular action databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions
are also provided with systematic discussions.
