Point cloud is an important data format that can completely express scene information. In recent years, with the dramatic increase of polygon complexity of model, the advantage of point model becomes more and more obvious. The point-based computer graphics, which takes point cloud as the research object, has aroused the attention of more and more people, and has been widely used in many fields such as computer vision, automatic driving and robot. In this paper, the point cloud segmentation methods and research status were reviewed in detail, the representative algorithms of each type of methods were analyzed and introduced, and the basic ideas, advantages and disadvantages of each type of methods were summarized. Finally, the problems faced by the segmentation technology and the development direction of the future work are prospected.