The invention discloses a mobile terminal movement recognition method based on infrared. According to the method, the movement direction is recognized through an infrared emitter and an infrared receiver. Compared with a traditional human body movement recognition method based on vision, installing is convenient, cost and power consumption are low, the responding speed is high, the algorithm is simple, the sensitivity is high, stability and reliability are achieved, the mobile terminal movement recognition method is very suitable for being applied to a mobile terminal, system software and application software of the mobile terminal can very conveniently achieve gesture flipping over, incoming call gesture answering, gesture unlocking, gesture dialing and other distinctive functions through an interface provided based on the method.