Abstract: As one important part of post-earthquake loss assessment, building damage detection has important significance for understanding the disaster in time, implementing the emergency response, and post-disaster reconstructing. In recent years the development of the multi-platform remote sensing and the high-resolution remote sensing technology have provided opportunities to building damage detection with high accuracy. In this paper, firstly, the basic building damage characteristics and the concrete classification criteria are introduced. Then, the common damage detection methods at home and abroad based on the remote sensing technology are concluded, including the single-temporal image detection of the post-earthquake, the change detection between the pre-earthquake and the post-earthquake images, and the damage detection based on the multi-sources data. Limitations and drawbacks of these methods are proposed. Finally, combining with some cutting-edge technologies in remote sensing domain, the latest research progress of building damage detection based on the high-resolution remote sensing technology, synthetic aperture radar technology, light detection and ranging technology, and oblique aerial photography technology are summarized in detail.