This study aims to address the limitations in gesture recognition caused by the susceptibility of temporal and frequency domain feature extraction from surface electromyography signals, as well as the low recognition rates of conventional classifiers. A novel gesture recognition approach was proposed, which transformed surface electromyography signals into grayscale images and employed convolutional neural networks as classifiers. The method began by segmenting the active portions of the surface electromyography signals using an energy threshold approach. Temporal voltage values were then processed through linear scaling and power transformations to generate grayscale images for convolutional neural network input. Subsequently, a multi-view convolutional neural network model was constructed, utilizing asymmetric convolutional kernels of sizes 1 × n and 3 × n within the same layer to enhance the representation capability of surface electromyography signals. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved recognition accuracies of 98.11% for 13 gestures and 98.75% for 12 multi-finger movements, significantly outperforming existing machine learning approaches. The proposed gesture recognition method, based on surface electromyography grayscale images and multi-view convolutional neural networks, demonstrates simplicity and efficiency, substantially improving recognition accuracy and exhibiting strong potential for practical applications.