This paper describes an experimental study about a robust contour feature (shape-context) for using in action recognition based on continuous hidden Markov models (HMM). We ran different experimental setting using the KTH’s database of actions. The image contours are extracted using a standard algorithm. The shape-context feature vector is build from of histogram of a set ofnon-overlapping regions in the image. We show that the combined use of HMM and this feature gives equivalent o better results, in term of action detection, that current approaches in the literature.