Methods, apparatuses, and computer program products are herein provided for enabling hand gesture recognition using an example infrared (IR) enabled mobile terminal. One example method may include determining a hand region in at least one captured frame using an adaptive omnidirectional edge operator (AOEO). The method may further include determining a threshold for hand region extraction using a recursive binarization scheme. The method may also include determining a hand location using the determined threshold for the extracted hand region in the at least one captured frame. The method may also include determining a fingertip location based on the determined hand location. Similar and related example apparatuses and example computer program products are also provided.