Abstract: Acoustic vector sensor simultaneously, colocately and directly measures orthogonal components of particle velocity as well as pressure at single point in acoustic field so that is possible to improve performance of traditional underwater acoustic measurement devices or detection systems and extends new ideas for solving practical underwater acoustic engineering problems. Although acoustic vector sensor history of appearing in underwater acoustic area is no long, but with huge and potential military demands, acoustic vector sensor has strong development trend in last decade, it is evolving into a one of important underwater acoustic technology. Under this background, we try to review recent progress in study on acoustic vector sensor signal processing, such as signal detection, DOA estimation, beamforming, and so on.