The invention discloses a program starting method and mobile terminals. The method includes: collecting gesture information and a sound signal of a gesture operation carried out in an image collectionregion of a terminal; finding a program, which matches the gesture operation, in a gesture operation library according to the gesture information and the sound signal, wherein the gesture operation library stores an association relationship between the gesture operation and the program, and the program is used for realizing a specific function; and starting the program. Compared with schemes of simply adopting gesture starting in the prior art, the embodiment of the invention can effectively avoid misoperations of starting through carrying out starting of the program from two dimensions of the gesture information and the sound signal of the gesture operation, and increase types of available gesture operations; and a terminal screen can be not necessarily touched in the gesture operation,and use convenience of a user can be effectively improved.