As an important research direction of computer vision, target detection has been widely used in face recognition, intelligent driving, robot navigation and other fields. In recent years, with the deepening research on deep learning, great progress has been made in the field of computer vision, such as image acquisition, image processing and target detection. Compared with the traditional target detection algorithm based on candidate regions, it has the problems of poor timeliness and slow detection speed. Recently, the popular target detection algorithm based on regression realizes the real sense of end-to-end detection and greatly improves the detection efficiency. However, the accuracy of small target detection and dense target detection has not been solved. In the future, we still need to improve the efficiency and accuracy of recognition on the existing basis, and solve the problem of small target and dense target detection to make it more widely used in practical application scenarios. In this paper, the principle, advantages and disadvantages, accuracy and other aspects of the above algorithms are introduced in detail, the problems existing in the target detection algorithm are summarized, and the future development direction has been prospected. In short, both algorithms have advantages and disadvantages, but the regression-based target detection algorithm has better practicality and development prospects.