Abstract: According to various aspects, systems and methods are disclosed for the implementation of a touch-free, gesture based user interface for mobile computing systems. Aspects of the system describe components used for capturing digital video frames from a video stream using the native hardware of the mobile computing system. Further aspects of the system describe efficient object recognition and tracking components capable of recognizing the motion of a defined model object. Various aspects of the disclosed system provide systems and processes for associating the recognized motion of a model object with a gesture, as well as associating the gesture with a user interface operation.