We present methods for learning and tracking human motion in video. We estimate a statistical model of typical activities from a large set of 3D periodic human motion data by segmenting these data automatically into "cycles". Then the mean and the principal components of the cycles are computed using a new algorithm that accounts for missing information and enforces smooth transitions between cycles. The learned temporal model provides a prior probability distribution over human motions that can be used inaBayesian framework for tracking human subjects in complex monocular video sequences and recovering their 3D motion