HMDB51: A Large Video Database for Human Motion Recognition Official

HMDB51 contains 6,849 short video clips across 51 action categories, compiled from movies and web videos to capture diverse viewpoints, camera motion, and visual conditions.

Downloads

Video Database

HMDB51 (official release, unstabilized) — about 2 GB; 51 classes, 6,849 clips.
HMDB51 (stabilized) — same clips and labels, with geometric frame alignment; each clip includes a mask file [video_name].form readable in MATLAB.
Train/Test splits (3 lists) — predefined lists for Split 1–3 (used for standard evaluation).

License: CC BY 4.0

Community Mirrors and Tools

Additional community mirrors provided for convenience.

Action Classes (51)

General facial actions

smile, laugh, chew, talk

Facial actions with object manipulation

smoke, eat, drink

General body movements

cartwheel, clap hands, climb, climb stairs, dive, fall on the floor, backhand flip, handstand, jump, pull up, push up, run, sit down, sit up, somersault, stand up, turn, walk, wave

Body movements with object interaction

brush hair, catch, draw sword, dribble, golf, hit something, kick ball, pick, pour, push something, ride bike, ride horse, shoot ball, shoot bow, shoot gun, swing baseball bat, sword exercise, throw

Human–human interaction

fencing, hug, kick someone, kiss, punch, shake hands, sword fight

Meta-Labels

Each video clip is annotated with meta-labels describing various attributes:

Viewpoint

side_view, front_view, back_view, top_view, bottom_view

Video quality

low_quality, medium_quality, high_quality

Illumination

dark, medium_light, bright

Focal length

short_focal, medium_focal, long_focal

Video Stabilization

The original HMDB51 dataset contains unstabilized videos. A stabilized version is also available, where geometric frame alignment has been applied to reduce camera motion. The unstabilized version is the official release.

Citation

5,336 citations on Google Scholar as of November 2025.

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

H. Kuehne, H. Jhuang, E. Garrote, T. Serre and T. Poggio. HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition. ICCV, 2011.