Human motion capture has now played a pivotal role in more and more applications, including biomechanics, sports, image segment, animation, robotics, etc. Although commercial marker-based human motion capture models have matured, the shortcomings, such as obtrusion, expense, errors due to damage to the marker trajectories, long set-up times and etc. exposed by this approach are becoming more and more apparent. Marker-less human motion capture analysis is likely to provide inexpensive and efficient solutions to solving these problems for the reconstruction of human motion in the future. In this paper, we discuss and compare the background and characteristics of marker-based and marker-less human motion capture models. Then we divide the marker-less human motion capture into single view and multi view and display some popular models. These methods are also categorized according to their internal logic and algorithms. Finally, we present some of the major shortcomings of the current marker-less human motion capture models and the future direction of development.