Nowadays, the human behavior analysis by computer vision techniques has been an interesting issue for researchers. Automatic recognition of actions in video allows automation of many otherwise manually intensive tasks such as video surveillance. Video surveillance system especially for elderly care and their behavior analysis has an important role to take care of aged, impatient or bedridden persons. In this paper, we propose a high accuracy human action classification and recognition method using hidden Markov model classifier. In our approach, first, we use star skeleton feature extraction method to extract extremities of human body silhouette to produce feature vectors as inputs of hidden Markov model classifier. Then, hidden Markov model, which is learned and used in our proposed surveillance system, classifies the investigated behaviors and detects abnormal actions with high accuracy in comparison by other abnormal detection reported in previous works. The accuracy about 94% resulted from confusion matrix approve the efficiency of the proposed method when compared with its counterparts for abnormal action detection.