As a key technology of land use/land cover detection, change detection aims to detect the changed part and its type in the remote sensing data of the same region in different periods. In view of the problems in traditional change detection methods, such as heavy manual labor and poor detection results, a large number of change detection methods based on remote sensing images have been proposed. In order to further understand the change detection technology based on remote sensing images and further study on the change detection methods, a comprehensive review of change detection was carried out by sorting, analyzing and comparing a large number of researches on change detection. Firstly, the development process of change detection was described. Then, the research progress of change detection was summarized in detail from three aspects:data selection and preprocessing, change detection technology, post-processing and precision evaluation, where the change detection technology was mainly summarized from analysis unit and comparison method respectively. Finally, the summary of the problems in each stage of change detection was performed and the future development directions were proposed.