Abstract: Fighting shots are the highlights of action movies and an effective approach to discriminating fighting shots is very useful for many applications, such as movie trailer construction, movie content filtering, and movie content retrieval. In this paper, we present a novel method for this task. Our approach first extracts the reliable motion information of local invariant features through a robust keypoint tracking computation; then foreground keypoints are distinguished from background keypoints by a sophisticated voting process; further, the parameters of the camera motion model is computed based on the motion information of background keypoints, and this model is then used as a reference to compute the actual motion of foreground keypoints; finally, the corresponding feature vectors are extracted to characterizing the motions of foreground keypoints, and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is trained based on the extracted feature vectors to discriminate fighting shots. Experimental results on representative action movies show our approach is very effective.