Abstract: As a visualization technique of spatial sound field, beamforming has been widely studied and applied in the field of sound source identification. Not only the development courses of the microphone arrays and the beamforming post-processing algorithms are reviewed, but also their characteristics are summed up. Furthermore, the development trends are summarized, which mainly include the development and modification of microphone arrays and algorithms with better sound source identification performance, the improvement of the adaptability, the research on the uncertainty of beamforming results, the study of the sound source mapping and visualization based on sound quality metrics, and so on. It provides a good reference for understanding beamforming techniques.