Explosives have resulted in numerous property losses, serious environmental pollution problems and even heavy casualties. Nowadays, military explosives have been mainly used by the national defense department. Owing to its great significance for sovereignty and territorial integrity, a huge effort has been devoted to developing various detection methods, such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscope, ion mobility spectrometer, mass spectrometer. From these strategies, optical sensing explosive method stands out due to its ultralow detection limit, rapid response, facilitate portability as well as on-site visualization. However, with the increasingly strict peddling regulation, improvised explosives have been adopted as the ideal option of terrorists since their ingredients are readily available, low cost and legally purchased, as well as their destructive power is nearly equivalent to military explosives. This could be fully consolidated by the reported data from world media that more than 70% of the injuries and deaths in terrorist incidents are caused by improvised explosives. Resulted from approximate one hundred years of in-depth understanding of military explosives, optical sensing military explosives are relatively mature, while optical sensing improvised explosives are still in their infancy since the intrinsic properties of improvised explosives are completely different from that of military explosives such as they are non-volatile ionic crystal and extreme discrepancy of electronic configuration, which make the detection of improvised explosives extremely difficult and there is only limited reference significance to optical sensing improvised explosives. Therefore, developing an appropriate methodology for realizing optical sensing improvised explosives is urgent demand and central challenge for mitigating public security concerns via tracking beginnings, stemming their flow and qualitative identification of post-explosive residues.As the two main methods of optical sensing, colorimetric and fluorescent detection have attracted much attention and been attempted to detect improvised explosives in that their optical signal changes usually depend on specific chemical reactions. Taking full advantages of colorimetric and fluorescent detection, various probes have been orientedly designed including ligand modified inorganic materials, small moldcules, macromolecules and optical films. There are two main basic factors that determine the realization and properties of optical sensing, one is the specific binding affinity between probe and improvised explosives that directly determine the realization and specificity. The other one is maximum the optical signal change for enhancing sensitivity by regulating the chromophore or fluorophore according to the effect of specific binding affinity on the molecular vibration, molecular rotation and even electronic state. If the interferents in natural environment possess similar colorimetric or fluorescent signals, the detection results would be certain to cause fault. In recent decades, combining the complementary advantages of colorimetric detection and fluorescent detection, colorimetric/fluorescent dual-mode sensing strategy emerges and shows tremendous superiorities involving the elimination of fluorescent interferents by colorimetric signal and the elimination of colored interferents by fluorescent signal. Thus, the design strategy of colorimetric/fluorescent dual-mode probe will be systematically analyzed after summarizing the colorimetric or fluorescent methods toward improvised explosives.Along with the development of probe design, the ability of detecting improvised explosives has also progressed from ultralow concentration of solution, ultratrace solid residue to airborne improvised explosive microparticulate with the assistance of innovating substrates from solution, solid to hydrogel, which greatly facilitate the on-site detection of improvised explosives. However, there is still a tremendous lack of reviews from this viewpoint despite its great significance of practical applications. Thus, it is the right time to conclude the recent progress in colorimetric/fluorescent sensing toward improvised explosives, especially focusing on designing optical sensing materials with excellent specificity, developing a methodology of maximum change of optical signal and establishing a scientific paradigm of on-site sensing ultratrace improvised explosives. In this review, not only diverse methodologies have been summarized to provide a theoretical foundation of design optical sensing materials, but also the trend of developing novel strategy is systematically analyzed.