Abstract Detecting and understanding human action under sophisticated lighting condition and backgrounds, also known as human action recognition in real-world context, is an indispensable component in modern intelligent systems and has becoming a hot research topic currently. Nowadays, human action recognition is still a tough challenge due to intra-class and inter-class, environment and temporal-level differences of the same action. Algorithms based on the single visual channel cannot achieve satisfactory performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel action recognition framework towards sophisticated activity understanding, focusing on intelligently combining multimodel quality-related action features. Specifically, we first design a multi-channel feature fusion (MCFF) algorithm to capture visual appearance, motion and acoustic patterns from each video frame, where image-level labels are characterized by choosing high quality multimodel features. Subsequently, we design an adaptive key frame selection algorithm that can be applied to characterize human action from human action video stream. Thereafter, we engineer a multimodel feature based on an auxiliary human action retrieval system to achieve sophisticated activity understanding. Extensive experimental evaluations have demonstrated that the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method.