Methods and systems for video action recognition using poselet keyframes are disclosed. An action recognition model may be implemented to spatially and temporally model discriminative action components as a set of discriminative keyframes. One method of action recognition may include the operations of selecting a plurality of poselets that are components of an action, encoding each of a plurality of video frames as a summary of the detection confidence of each of the plurality of poselets for the video frame, and encoding correlations between poselets in the encoded video frames.