The invention discloses a human body motion feature extraction method based on a global remarkable edge area, comprising steps of using a contrast between an area and a whole image to calculate the significance, reducing the color quantity of the color space, smoothing the significance of the color space, calculating the significance area according to the space relation of the neighboring areas, performing morphology gradient changing on the foreground area segmented by a binarized threshold to generate a global remarkable edge area, traversing strong corner points of all grids of the video frames under various sizes, collecting key characteristic points, the light stream amplitude value of which is not 0, in the remarkable edge area, solving the displacement of the strong corner point according to the corrected light stream field, and forming the human body motion local time space characteristic by using the strong corner point continuous multi-frame displacement locus and the neighbourhood gradient vector. The invention extracts the motion characteristics through global remarkable edge area, eliminates the background noise points irrelevant to the human body motion, removes the affect on the light stream calculation by the camera motion, improves the accuracy of the human body motion local time space characteristic description and improves the human body motion recognition rate.