Automation is the essential need for the present world. There are various types of automations like building automation, industrial automation, Home automation, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Smart can be a potential application which provides support to elderly or disabled persons. Home automation is the use and control of home appliances remotely or automatically. Day by day the gap between machines and humans is being reduced. Nowadays hand gesture based home automation is getting more importance. Gesture recognition refers to recognising the motion of the human parts like hand, face, etc. Most of the electronic components manufactures focuses on the hand gesture basis. In this proposed work MATLAB based algorithm is used. This proposed work uses this tool for the recognition and processing of the hand gesture. The algorithm used for this proposed work is the object detection algorithm. At first the image is captured by the camera and it is processed by the MATLAB, if the preloaded gesture is matched with the existing gesture the data will be sent to the microcontroller, then the home appliances are controlled. There are other applications which could be controlled by a gesture such as media players, robots and virtual objects. The hardware module consists of camera, PIC microcontroller, fan, light, power supply, LED, GSM module. This hardware module is communicated with simulation software using a USB to serial converter bus which comes along with driver software.