Crowd management and monitoring is crucial for maintaining public safety and is an important research topic. Developing a robust crowd monitoring system (CMS) is a challenging task as it involves addressing many key issues such as density variation, irregular distribution of objects, occlusions, pose estimation, etc. Crowd gathering at various places like hospitals, parks, stadiums, airports, cultural and religious points are usually monitored by Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. The drawbacks of CCTV cameras are: limited area coverage, installation problems, movability, high power consumption and constant monitoring by the operators. Therefore, many researchers have turned towards computer vision and machine learning that have overcome these issues by minimizing the need of human involvement. This review is aimed to categorize, analyze as well as provide the latest development and performance evolution in crowd monitoring using different machine learning techniques and methods that are published in journals and conferences over the past five years.