Object detection is one of the major challenges in visual sensor networks (VSNs) which is set up in the monitoring applications. Many approaches proposed to solve the object detection problem in VSNs, considering diverse metrics such as reliability, energy consumption, detection accuracy and being realtime. In this paper, a survey on the object detection methods in visual sensor networks is presented for the first time. Furthermore, this paper classified the methods precisely. Two main object detection categories in VSNs that explored in this paper are conventional object detection methods and object detection approaches with the camera nodes involvement. To be more precise, presented survey promotes an overview of recent object detection methods' literature with their performance evaluation. Also, this research is challenging and the object detection issue in the visual sensor networks is open caused by differences in estimations and performance metrics. Therefore, the survey concludes with open research challenges.