For the problem of time, effort and money consuming to obtain a large number of samples by conventional means faced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) application research in different fields, a variety of sample augmentation methods have been proposed in many AI research fields. Firstly, the research background and significance of data augmentation were introduced. Then, the methods of data augmentation in several common fields (including natural image recognition, character recognition and discourse parsing) were summarized, and on this basis, a detailed overview of sample acquisition or augmentation methods in the field of medical image assisted diagnosis was provided, including X-ray, Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. Finally, the key issues of data augmentation methods in AI application fields were summarized and the future development trends were prospected. It can be concluded that obtaining a sufficient number of broadly representative training samples is the key to the research and development of all AI fields. Both the common fields and the professional fields have conducted sample augmentation, and different fields or even different research directions in the same field have different sample acquisition or augmentation methods. In addition, sample augmentation is not simply to increase the number of samples, but to reproduce the existence of real samples that cannot be completely covered by small sample size as far as possible, so as to improve sample diversity and enhance AI system performance.