This paper presents a comprehensive review of human gesture recognition algorithms before and after the release of low cost high resolution depth/RGB Microsoft Kinect sensor. Gesture recognition becomes an active research area in computer vision for the past one or two decades. After the release of Kinect sensor, a number of significant research advances were made particularly in pose estimation considering the depth images. Pose estimation using depth images can address major problems faced by the conventional RGB based approaches. This survey reviews the latest trends in pose estimation using depth images as well as discussing the limitations or problems faced by these approaches. The future research directions are highlighted to improve the current pose estimation algorithms. This paper expected to serve as a reference for the researchers who willing to develop new gesture recognition algorithms based on Microsoft Kinect. © 2006-2016 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).