Through the analysis and process of visual images of gesture words, this paper realizes the recognition of the gesture words, and this will lay a good foundation to recognize gesture language. Firstly, the acquired images are preprocessed by denoising; secondly the gesture images are segmented from the background images by setting their thresholds, and the outline of the gesture images information is obtained under morphology operations; thirdly by extracting centroid coordinates of the target gestures, the gesture images are positioned and segmented; in the end, the gesture words can be identified by calculating the extreme values to the modules. The above algorithm is validated through the Matlab software. The experimental results show that the algorithm is reliable and has good robustness.