Human action recognition has become vital aspect of video analytics. This study explores methods for the classification of human actions by extracting silhouette of object and then applying feature extraction. The method proposes to integrate HOG feature and PCA feature effectively to form a feature descriptor which is used further to train KNN classifier. HOG gives local shape-oriented variations of the object while PCA gives global information about frequently moving parts of human body. Experiments conducted on Weizmann and KTH datasets show results comparable with existing methods. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.