Acoustic event detection refers to the task of detecting each semantic segment in an audio stream and associating it with a classification label. Acoustic event detection is a fundamental technique for sound scene recognition and semantic understanding, and it is very promising in many application fields, such as the semantic understanding of the environmental sounds for a human-like robot, the context aware of sounds in the travelling environment for an unmanned vehicle. In this paper, the history of acoustic event detection is reviewed from the point of view of related fields and application requirements, meanwhile, the typical works of acoustic event detection is introduced, and the future research of acoustic event detection is analyzed. In the analysis of related fields, we focus on the researches of speech recognition, music processing based on computation, and sound processing based on auditory. In the application requirements, we introduce the works of context aware of sounds and multimedia information retrieval. Finally, the state of the art in acoustic event detection is analyzed, and its future research fields is predicted.