During the last two decades, there has been substantial progress in multirate digital filters and filter banks. This includes the design of quadrature mirror filters (QMF). A two-channel QMF bank is extensively used in many signal processing fields such as subband coding of speech signal, image processing, antenna systems, design of wavelet bases, and biomedical engineering and in digital audio industry. Therefore, new efficient design techniques are being proposed by several authors in this area. This paper presents an overview of analysis and design techniques of the two-channel QMF bank. Application in the area of subband coding and future research trends are also discussed.