Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to characterize deformable surface using intrinsic property dynamics. 3D dynamic surfaces representing humans in motion can be obtained using multiple view stereo reconstruction methods or depth cameras. Nowadays these technologies have become capable to capture surface variations in real-time, and give details such as clothing wrinkles and deformations. Assuming repetitive patterns in the deformations, we propose to model complex surface variations using sets of linear dynamical systems (LDS) where observations across time are given by surface intrinsic properties such as local curvatures. We introduce an approach based on bags of dynamical systems, where each surface feature to be represented in the codebook is modeled by a set of LDS equipped with timing structure. Experiments are performed on datasets of real-world dynamical surfaces and show compelling results for description, classi?cation and segmentation.