**Abstract**

Deep Learning, also known as deep representation learning, has dramatically improved the performances on a variety of learning tasks and achieved tremendous successes in the past few years. Specifically, artificial neural networks are mainly studied, which mainly include Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Among these networks, CNNs got the most attention due to the kernel methods with the weight sharing mechanism, and achieved state-of-the-art in many domains, especially computer vision. In this research, we conduct a comprehensive survey related to the recent improvements in CNNs, and we demonstrate these advances from the low level to the high level, including the convolution operations, convolutional layers, architecture design, loss functions, and advanced applications.

**Keywords:** deep learning, CNNs, kernel methods, weight sharing, comprehensive survey
