The invention discloses a method for recognizing a gesture based on an acceleration sensor. The method for recognizing the gesture based on the acceleration sensor comprises the steps that firstly, signals of the three-axis acceleration sensor is collected, a smooth denoising filter is designed and used for preprocessing the signals, and detection of the boundary of a gesture signal is automatically achieved; with the combination of a non-gesture filtering strategy, non-gesture data are filtered out before template matching; by the adoption of dynamic planning and a DTW algorithm, matching calculation is conducted on gesture data to be recognized and stored template data, and therefore a template gesture which is the most similar to the gesture to be recognized is found; through the strategies such as curve path limitation conducted by a slope, path area limitation and setting of a distorted threshold value, the template matching calculation amount is reduced, and the recognizing cost is reduced; through the template self-adaption strategy, a sample template base is updated automatically, and the gesture recognizing accuracy is improved. According to the method for recognizing the gesture based on the acceleration sensor, on the premise that energy consumption of a terminal is not obviously increased, better user experience is provided through high recognition efficiency and high recognition accuracy, and freer man-machine interaction is facilitated.