Gesture recognition based on surface electromyographic signal (sEMG) is one of the most used methods. The traditional manual feature extraction can only extract some low-level signal features, this causes poor classifier performance and low recognition accuracy when dealing with some complex signals. A recognition method, namely SEDCNN-SVM, is proposed to recognize sEMG of different gestures. SEDCNN-SVM consists of an improved deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and a support vector machine (SVM). The DCNN can automatically extract and learn the feature information of sEMG through the convolution operation of the convolutional layer, so that it can capture the complex and high-level features in the data. The Squeeze and Excitation Networks (SE-Net) and the residual module were added to the model, so that the feature representation of each channel could be improved, the loss of feature information in convolutional operations was reduced, useful feature information was captured, and the problem of network gradient vanishing was eased. The SVM can improve the generalization ability and classification accuracy of the model by constructing an optimal hyperplane of the feature space. Hence, the SVM was used to replace the full connection layer and the Softmax function layer of the DCNN, the use of a suitable kernel function in SVM can improve the model's generalization ability and classification accuracy. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed classification algorithm, this method is analyzed and compared with other comparative classification methods. The recognition accuracy of SEDCNN-SVM can reach 0.955, it is significantly improved compared with other classification methods, the SEDCNN-SVM model is recognized online in real time.