In recent years, the demand for three-dimensional (3D) information of the objective world and scene has increased sharply and drives the rapid development of 3D measurement techniques based on structured light illumination. The 3D imaging technique based on fringe projection and phase-shift fringe analysis has high accuracy and robustness, standing out among many techniques, and is widely used in industrial inspection, digitalization of antique, biomedicine detection, and so on. In the application scenarios with timeliness requirements such as human-computer interaction, virtual reality, online detection, and remote surgery, realizing real-time 3D measurement is of great significance and obvious value. In this paper, the basic theory of 3D imaging technique based on phase-shift fringe analysis was introduced. Several optimization directions for real-time 3D imaging were discussed, and different methods in various optimization directions were reviewed. Finally, the challenges and potential research directions of real-time 3D imaging technique based on phase-shift fringe analysis were summarized.