With the rapid development of China’s aquaculture and aquatic processing industries, aquatic products have become more and more important in the national diet structure, which make consumers have more requirements for the quality of aquatic products. In order to meet consumers’ need for the quality of aquatic products, enterprises and markets need to detect the quality of aquatic products at every links in the supply chain and make it public. Therefore, it urgently needs to develop a technology that can satisfy the fast non-destructive testing of aquatic products.Spectroscopic technology can infer the material properties and component content based on the spectral characteristics of the sample at the characteristic wavelength, which has huge application prospects in the detection of aquatic product freshness, hazardous substance residue, harmful microorganism, quality classification, adulteration analysis and so on.This review discusses and summarizes the advantages and limitations of several commonly used spectroscopic techniques in aquatic product quality testing. It is believed that compared with traditional laboratory testing methods, spectroscopic techniques have the advantages of fast, non-destructive, good test reproducibility, and high accuracy. These characteristics make it possible for online real-time detection of aquatic product quality, which can bring huge economic benefits. However, spectral detection also has the disadvantages of high initial investment, poor universality and need for continuous maintenance. Each spectrum technology also has its own scope and limitations.Therefore, this technology in the quality inspection of aquatic products needs further research and improvement. This review collates the existing relevant research literature at home and abroad, discussing and commentingon the commonly used spectral data preprocessing algorithms and prediction models in the detection process. Focusing on characteristics and current application status of four kinds of spectral preprocessing algorithms and several modeling methods. At present, the application of spectroscopic technology in aquatic product quality testing is mainly in the laboratory research stage, rather than been applied to commodity markets and consumer markets widely. Based on the above analysis, this paper prospects the future development of the application of spectroscopy technology in the quality inspection of aquatic products, think that building a unified, standard and efficient spectral detection model library, combined multiple indicators to correlation analysis, eliminate environmental interference during the spectrum acquisition process, and realizing online real-time detection of aquatic product quality is the future technology development trend.