The invention discloses a hand gesture recognition method based on a switching Kalman filtering model. The hand gesture recognition method based on a switching Kalman filtering model comprises the steps that a hand gesture video database is established, and the hand gesture video database is pre-processed; image backgrounds of video frames are removed, and two hand regions and a face region are separated out based on a skin color model; morphological operation is conducted on the three areas, mass centers are calculated respectively, and the position vectors of the face and the two hands and the position vector between the two hands are obtained; an optical flow field is calculated, and the optical flow vectors of the mass centers of the two hands are obtained; a coding rule is defined, the two optical flow vectors and the three position vectors of each frame of image are coded, so that a hand gesture characteristic chain code library is obtained; an S-KFM graph model is established, wherein a characteristic chain code sequence serves as an observation signal of the S-KFM graph model, and a hand gesture posture meaning sequence serves as an output signal of the S-KFM graph model; optimal parameters are obtained by conducting learning with the characteristic chain code library as a training sample of the S-KFM; relevant steps are executed again for a hand gesture video to be recognized, so that a corresponding characteristic chain code is obtained, reasoning is conducted with the corresponding characteristic chain code serving as input of the S-KFM, and finally a hand gesture recognition result is obtained.