A method for recognizing a subject motion using a camera is provided, in which each of the previous and current image frames received from the camera is split into multiple image blocks, motion blocks are detected among the image blocks based on a difference between previous and current pixel values for each of the image frames, a motion center is detected based on positions of the motion blocks for each image frame, and the subject motion appearing in the previous and current image frames is recognized based on the motion centers of the previous and current image frames.