In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of unusual event detection in video surveillance systems. The proposed approach makes a step toward generic and automatic detection of unusual events in terms of velocity and acceleration. At first, the moving objects in the scene are detected and tracked. A better representation of moving objects trajectories is then achieved by means of appropriate pre-processing techniques. A supervised Support Vector Machine method is then used to train the system with one or more typical sequences, and the resulting model is then used for testing the proposed method with other typical sequences (different scenes and scenarios). Experimental results are shown to be promising. The presented approach is capable of determining similar unusual events as in the training sequences.