Gesture recognition is to recognizing meaningful expressions of motion by a human, involving the hands, arms, face, head, and/or body.Hand Gestures have greater importance in designing an intelligent and efficient human– computer interface. The applications of gesture recognition are manifold, ranging from sign language through medical rehabilitation to virtual reality.In this paper a survey on various recent gesture recognition approaches is provided with particular emphasis on hand gestures. A review of static hand posture methods are explained with different tools and algorithms applied on gesture recognition system, including connectionist models, hidden Markov model, and fuzzy clustering. Challenges and future research directions are also highlighted.