About training the vgg-vd-16 model from scratch

[qiulesun]

I want to train the vgg-vd-16 model from scratch, which parameter initialization method should I choose, gaussian or xavier or xavierimproved?

[qiulesun]

I use the batch-normalization,but the top1err decreased only from 0.99 to 0.91 after 5 epochs, and the convergence rate was slow.Is this normal?