Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a type of deep neural network commonly used for analyzing visual imagery. CNNs use various techniques like convolution, ReLU activation, and pooling to extract features from images and reduce dimensionality while retaining important information. CNNs are trained end-to-end using backpropagation to update filter weights and minimize output error. Overall CNN architecture involves an input layer, multiple convolutional and pooling layers to extract features, fully connected layers to classify features, and an output layer. CNNs can be implemented using sequential models in Keras by adding layers, compiling with an optimizer and loss function, fitting on training data over epochs with validation monitoring, and evaluating performance on test data.