There has been a lot of attention paid recently to analyze dynamic human gestures that vary over time. Most attention to dynamic gestures concerns with spatio-temporal features, as compared to analyzing each frame of gestures separately. For accurate dynamic gesture recognition, motion feature extraction algorithms need to find representative features that uniquely identify time-varying gestures. This paper proposes a new feature-extraction algorithm using temporal self-similarity based on a hierarchical human model. Because a conventional temporal self-similarity method computes a whole movement among the continuous frames, the conventional temporal self-similarity method cannot recognize different gestures with the same amount of movement. The proposed model-based temporal self-similarity method groups body parts of a hierarchical model into several sets and calculates movements for each set. While recognition results can depend on how the sets are made, the best way to find optimal sets is to separate frequently used body parts from less-used body parts. Then, we apply a multiclass support vector machine whose optimization algorithm is based on structural support vector machines. In this paper, the effectiveness of the proposed feature extraction algorithm is demonstrated in an application for taebo gesture recognition. We show that the model-based temporal self-similarity method can overcome the shortcomings of the conventional temporal self-similarity method and the recognition results of the model-based method are superior to that of the conventional method.