Abstract: With the fast development of mobile internet, smart mobile terminals, and cloud computing, mobile visual search is of great research value and application prospect in the field of mobile e-commerce and network information security, etc. In this paper, based on a comprehensive survey of the progress of foreign and domestic research on mobile visual search, we introduce the system framework and key technologies of mobile visual search, and focus on detailed analysis of its main contents of feature extraction and representation, high dimensional indexing, and geometrical consistency verification, etc. Finally, we present some challenges, together with the future directions of the research on mobile visual search.