Aimed at the problems of high redundancy of trajectory and susceptibility to background interference in traditional dense trajectory behavior recognition methods, a human action recognition method based on foreground trajectory and motion difference descriptors is proposed. First, the motion magnitude of each frame is estimated by optical flow, and the foreground region is determined according to each motion magnitude of the pixels; the trajectories are only extracted from behavior-related foreground regions. Second, in order to better describe the relative temporal information between different actions, a motion difference descriptor is introduced to describe the foreground trajectory, and the direction histogram of the motion difference is constructed by calculating the direction information of the motion difference per unit time of the trajectory point. Finally, a Fisher vector (FV) is used to encode histogram features to obtain video-level action features, and a support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to classify the action category. Experimental results show that this method can better extract the action-related trajectory, and it can improve the recognition accuracy by 7% compared to the traditional dense trajectory method.