In this paper, we present an unsupervised learning framework for analyzing activities and interactions in surveillance videos. In our framework, three levels of video events are connected by Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) model: low-level visual features, simple atomic activities, and multi-agent interactions... Atomic activities are represented as distribution of low-level features, while complicated interactions are represented as distribution of atomic activities. This learning process is unsupervised. Given a training video sequence, low-level visual features are extracted based on optic flow and then clustered into different atomic activities and video clips are clustered into different interactions. The HDP model automatically decide the number of clusters, i.e. the categories of atomic activities and interactions. Based on the learned atomic activities and interactions, a training dataset is generated to train the Gaussian Process (GP) classifier. Then the trained GP models work in newly captured video to classify interactions and detect abnormal events in real time. Furthermore, the temporal dependencies between video events learned by HDP-Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are effectively integrated into GP classifier to enhance the accuracy of the classification in newly captured videos. Our framework couples the benefits of the generative model (HDP) with the discriminant model (GP). We provide detailed experiments showing that our framework enjoys favorable performance in video event classification in real-time in a crowded traffic scene. (read more)