Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks: A Survey on Architectures, Applications, and Future Directions

Quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) are a highly appealing architecture that combines quantum computing and deep learning. Inspired by classical convolutional neural network (CNN) hierarchical feature extraction, QCNNs use quantum operations such as entanglement, superposition, and measurement to capture complex correlations in high-dimensional datasets. Since their introduction, QCNNs have evolved into several architectural variants, including fully quantum, variational, hybrid, and graph-based models, and have been investigated in applications ranging from quantum many-body physics to classical machine learning tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and time-series forecasting. The development of software ecosystems such as Qiskit Machine Learning, Pennylane, and TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ) has facilitated rapid development and experimentation, speeding up research. Despite these developments, existing research remains divided, with many focused on individual implementations and lacking a unifying taxonomy or full review. This article addresses that gap by providing a systematic and holistic survey on QCNN, offering comparative insights across key architectures, applications, and toolboxes, and outlining open challenges. We also identify potential study areas, such as scalable architectures, domain-knowledge integration, fault tolerance, and security. This survey seeks to serve as a basic reference for furthering QCNN research in the current near-term quantum era and beyond, providing both architectural insights and application-driven viewpoints.