Abstract: The study of asperities is of great importance for seismic hazard analysis. This paper introduces the concepts of asperities, barriers and their source models, and reviews the progress of research on the determination of asperities by seismic geodesy, mainly discusses the technique and method for determining asperities from the aspects of medium structure analysis (high-intensity anomalies), seismic activity analysis, the fault slip pattern, and the problems are analyzed. This paper also prospects the determination of the distribution of asperities on active faults, future researches will focus on joint inversion of geodetic data, joint geodetic and seismic geophysical data, and machine learning based methods to determinate the distribution of asperities. The study provides a strong theoretical basis for seismic safety evaluation.