Feature based extraction techniques attract a great attention in digital image watermarking to survive against various removal and geometric attacks. Due to information hiding according to the image content, these techniques find a huge popularity amongst different image watermarking techniques during the recent years. In this paper a survey is investigated in feature based extraction techniques to check, evaluate and compare the recent developments in this area. The aim is to find the vital influential factors on robustness, imperceptibility, capacity, security and speed of the watermarking algorithms proposed based on feature based extraction techniques as a recommendation for future researches. The experimental results prove the robustness of the selected features in each technique against the mentioned geometric and removal attacks.