Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown exemplary performance on several competitions related to Computer Vision and Image Processing. Interesting application areas of CNN include Image Classification and Segmentation, Object Detection, Video Processing, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, etc. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely due to the use of multiple feature extraction stages that can automatically learn representations from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware technology have accelerated the research in CNNs, and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures have been reported. In fact, several interesting ideas to bring advancements in CNNs have been explored such as the use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and architectural innovations. However, the major improvement in representational capacity of the deep CNN is achieved through architectural innovations. Especially, the idea of exploiting spatial and channel information, depth and width of architecture, and multi-path information processing has gained substantial attention. Similarly, the idea of using a block of layers as a structural unit is also gaining popularity. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported deep CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature-map exploitation, channel boosting, and attention. Additionally, the elementary understanding of CNN components, current challenges and applications of CNN are also provided. CNNs are the best among learning algorithms in understanding images content, and have shown exemplary results in segmentation, classification, detection, and retrieval related tasks [8], [9]. The success of CNNs has captured attention beyond academia. In industry, companies such as Google, Microsoft, AT&T, NEC, and Facebook have developed active research groups for exploring new architectures of CNN [10]. At present, most of the frontrunners of image processing and computer vision competitions are employing deep CNN based models.The attractive feature of CNN is its ability to exploit spatial or time correlation of the data. The topology of CNN is divided into multiple learning stages composed of a combination of the convolutional layers, non-linear processing units, and subsampling layers [11]. CNNs are feedforward multilayered hierarchical networks that are similar to fully connected neural network where each layer, using a bank of convolutional kernels, performs multiple transformations [12]. Convolution operation extracts useful features from locally correlated data points. Output of the convolutional kernels is assigned to non-linear processing unit (activation function), which not only helps in learning abstractions but also emb...