With the development of social media and human-computer interaction, video has become one of the most common data formats. As a research hotspot, emotion recognition system is essential to serve people by perceiving people’s emotional state in videos. In recent years, a large number of studies focus on tackling the issue of emotion recognition based on three most common modalities in videos, that is, face, speech and text. The focus of this paper is to sort out the relevant studies of emotion recognition using facial, speech and textual cues due to the lack of review papers concentrating on the three modalities. On the other hand, because of the effective leverage of deep learning techniques to learn latent representation for emotion recognition, this paper focuses on the emotion recognition method based on deep learning techniques. In this paper, we firstly introduce widely accepted emotion models for the purpose of interpreting the definition of emotion. Then we introduce the state-of-the-art for emotion recognition based on unimodality including facial expression recognition, speech emotion recognition and textual emotion recognition. For multimodal emotion recognition, we summarize the feature-level and decision-level fusion methods in detail. In addition, the description of relevant benchmark datasets, the definition of metrics and the performance of the state-of-the-art in recent years are also outlined for the convenience of readers to find out the current research progress. Ultimately, we explore some potential research challenges and opportunities to give researchers reference for the enrichment of emotion recognition-related researches.