The invention provides a mobile phone playing behavior detection and recognition method based on human body posture estimation, and belongs to the field of computer vision and image processing. According to the technical scheme, the method comprises the steps that firstly, a monitoring system is initialized; secondly, the monitoring system collects data; secondly, the monitoring system monitors 2Dkey points of the human body and positions a framework; then, the monitoring system detects the mobile phone near the joint point hand; then, the monitoring system constructs a human body specific joint space pose relation; and finally, the monitoring system presets a mobile phone playing state and a mobile phone non-playing state according to the posture of the human body and whether the mobilephone is detected or not and the spatial position and posture relation between the mobile phone and the human body, and if the monitoring system judges that the human body detected in the current monitoring scene is in the mobile phone playing state, the monitoring system gives an alarm. According to the invention, an alarm prompt can be accurately sent out under the condition that a detected person plays a mobile phone, and meanwhile, the monitoring mode has the characteristics of non-contact, non-immersion, wide monitoring range, easiness in implementation and the like.