1. An apparatus to recognize hand gestures, comprising: an offline module to determine a skin tone distribution for a plurality of pixels in a video signal, wherein the offline module includes an edge detection unit to receive a color image associated with a frame of the video signal and conduct an edge analysis on the color image for each of a plurality of channels and wherein the edge detection unit includes: box logic to, for each channel in the plurality of channels, determine a set of Gaussian derivatives; convolution logic to perform a convolution between the set of Gaussian derivatives and each pixel in the color image to obtain a gradient magnitude and a gradient angle for each pixel in the color image on a per channel basis; and threshold logic to use a low threshold and a high threshold to determine whether each gradient magnitude and associated gradient angle corresponds to an edge, wherein the low threshold and the high threshold are channel-specific; and an online module to use the skin tone distribution to conduct one or more blob-based hand gesture determinations with respect to the video signal.