We present a template-based approach to detecting human silhouettes in a specific walking pose. Our templates consist of short sequences of 2D silhouettes obtained from motion capture data. This lets us incorporate motion information into them and helps distinguish actual people who move in a predictable way from static objects whose outlines roughly resemble those of humans. Moreover, during the training phase we use statistical learning techniques to estimate and store the relevance of the different silhouette parts to the recognition task. At run-time, we use it to convert Chamfer distance to meaningful probability estimates. The templates can handle six different camera views, excluding the frontal and back view, as well as different scales. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique using both indoor and outdoor sequences of people walking in front of cluttered backgrounds and acquired with a moving camera, which makes techniques such as background subtraction impractical.