  Vision based human motion recognition has fascinated many researchers due to
its critical challenges and a variety of applications. The applications range
from simple gesture recognition to complicated behaviour understanding in
surveillance system. This leads to major development in the techniques related
to human motion representation and recognition. This paper discusses
applications, general framework of human motion recognition, and the details of
each of its components. The paper emphasizes on human motion representation and
the recognition methods along with their advantages and disadvantages. This
study also discusses the selected literature, popular datasets, and concludes
with the challenges in the domain along with a future direction. The human
motion recognition domain has been active for more than two decades, and has
provided a large amount of literature. A bird's eye view for new researchers in
the domain is presented in the paper.
