Abstract: Depth maps reduce the dimension loss of 3D human motion information in the process of vision acquisition, therefore depth map-based human action recognition reflects technical advantages in fields of feature extraction, representation and recognition accuracy, compared with traditional RGB image, and attracts the extensive attention. The research status of depth map-based human action recognition was summarized in this paper. First, the existing methods of recognizing human action from depth maps were collated and classified. Then, multiple publicly available human action datasets were introduced, and the accuracies of several datasets in different methods were compared. Finally, the possible future directions of human action recognition were analyzed.