As a kind of popular food, aquatic product is rich in water, protein, unsaturated fatty acids and free amino acids. However, due to temperature fluctuations or improper operation and other factors during storage, it leads to a series of food safety issues. Near infrared Reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) is a kind of technology which can determine the content of components with the absorption, scattering, reflection and transmission of light. As one method for food detection, it is widely used in the field of food which ranging from gas to liquid, from homogenate to powder, from solid materials to biological tissues. It can achieve the goal of qualitative or quantitative analysis for various samples instantly and accurately. It has the characteristics of rapid, nondestructive, safe and efficient, multi-component determination simultaneously. In this paper, the characteristic of common nondestructive detection technologies for aquatic products were comparatively analyzed, the principle of NIRS were illustrated, the application and the latest research progress of NIRS in the detection of aquatic products, such as freshness evaluation, physicochemical detection, food adulteration, quality classification and shelf-life prediction, were introduced respectively. Meanwhile it also tries to come up with some problems on the quality detection of aquatic products with NIRS according to the current development trends. On the basis of deeply improving the detection precision, the correlation analysis of various physicochemical indexes and the integration of various non-detection techniques will be investigated in order to give the overall evaluation of its quality and get more extensive application in aquatic products.