The invention discloses an optical flow-based gesture motion direction recognition method. The method comprises the following steps of acquiring an image sequence on the front of a computer by using a common camera with video graphics array resolution, and preprocessing the image sequence; distributing skin samples in an approximately elliptical area in a CbCr plane in a concentrated way, and determining whether to accord with skin colors according to a fact whether a pixel point falls in the elliptical area in the CbCr plane; performing morphological reconstruction on binary images subjected to skin color detection, and adopting closed operation in morphology; marking each white connected region, calculating an area of each white connected region, arraying white connected regions from large to small, and reserving three largest connected regions; reducing the resolution of the images, and acquiring an optical flow motion vector in a skin color area by using a pyramid LK optical flow method; judging the direction of the optical flow motion vector; judging the direction once every other two frames, and giving a result if directions are consistent twice; after a user is familiar with and masters the gesture motion operation rule, moving the gesture in the upper, lower, left and right directions before the camera. According to the method, real-time interaction can be completed, and the gesture motion direction recognition accuracy can be higher than 95 percent.