Coastline is the boundary between land and ocean, and the coastline position determination is the important content of the coastal zone, island and reef surveying. Coastline is generally divided into the island coastline and the mainland coastline. Under the background of global warming and the influence of the natural environment and human's exploitation, the coastline has been in a state of changing. Grasping the type, location, changing process and the future trend of the coastline accurately has great significance for guiding the coastal aquaculture, coastal zone development, navigation and transportation. Therefore, accurately and quickly extracting coastline and real-time monitoring its changes has the vital significance. Remote sensing technique has the features of observing large area synchronously, timely, and economically, which makes it an excellent choice for coastline classification and extraction. Now, remote sensing methods used in coastline extraction mainly include optical remote sensing, microwave remote sensing and laser radar technology. Various methods have been presented by researchers all over the world in recent years. However, some methods focus on waterline extraction instead of the defined coastline extraction. So this paper give summarize of waterline extraction and coastline extraction separately. Beyond that, the noise-reduction methods applied in coastline extraction and the solution of the inconsistency of level data in tidal are also mentioned in this paper. Overall, the paper reviews the recent research progresses on coastline extraction by all kinds of ways at home and abroad through analyzing their advantages, disadvantages and adaptability, and introducing their applications in many fields. Finally, feasible suggestion of the future research is forecasted based on its existent insufficiency.