Object detection is a vital research direction in machine vision and deep learning. The object detection technique based on deep understanding has achieved tremendous progress in feature extraction, image representation, classification, and recognition in recent years, due to this rapid growth of deep learning theory and technology. Scholars have proposed a series of methods for the object detection algorithm as well as improvements in data processing, network structure, loss function, and so on. In this paper, we introduce the characteristics of standard datasets and critical parameters of performance index evaluation, as well as the network structure and implementation methods of two-stage, single-stage, and other improved algorithms that are compared and analyzed. The latest improvement ideas of typical object detection algorithms based on deep learning are discussed and reached, from data enhancement, a priori box selection, network model construction, prediction box selection, and loss calculation. Finally, combined with the existing challenges, the future research direction of typical object detection algorithms is surveyed.