The invention relates to a human body skeleton-based action recognition method. The method is characterized by comprising the following basic steps that: step 1, a continuous skeleton data frame sequence of a person who is executing target actions is obtained from a somatosensory device; step 2, main joint point data which can characterize the actions are screened out from the skeleton data; step 3, action feature values are extracted from the main joint point data and are calculated, and a feature vector sequence of the actions is constructed; step 4, the feature vectors are preprocessed; step 4, the feature vector sequence of an action sample set is saved as an action sample template library; step 6, actions are acquired in real time, the distance value of the feature vector sequence of the actions and the feature vector sequence of all action samples in the template library is calculated by using a dynamic time warping algorithm; and step 7, the actions are classified and recognized. The method of the invention has the advantages of high real-time performance, high robustness, high accuracy and simple and reliable implementation, and is suitable for a real-time action recognition system.