Abstract: There exists extensive and complicated cross correlation,or cross media characteristic among the huge information on the Web.Discovery and retrieval of cross media information with high accuracy are crucial to make full use of web resources for meeting the users' information need.This paper gives a survey of cross media retrieval on various topics such as human cognition,multimedia annotation and semantic understanding,cross media representation and recognition,cross media retrieval and techniques for large scale of data.Meanwhile,the paper also discusses the open problems and potential trends in this field.