Ambient noise tomography is one of the most important breakthroughs in seismological research since the 21st century. The method does not depend on the occurrence of natural seismic events, but makes use of the "background noise" which is common in continuous seismic records. Through the cross-correlation between different stations, the empirical Green's function is extracted and the underground medium structure is imaging studied. Compared with the traditional natural source seismic detection methods, the ambient noise tomography has the advantages of high imaging resolution, high observation time and good repeatability. In recent years, with the continuous development of processing methods, ambient noise tomography technology has been increasingly widely used in urban underground space and mining areas such as shallow surface detection, crustal and lithospheric structure detection, the mantle and core of the earth deep structure detection, as well as monitoring the time-shift changes of underground media. Rapid progress has also been made in signal-to-noise ratio enhancement and weak signal extraction, body wave signal extraction and application, and new imaging methods. This paper systematically summarizes the basic principle and development of ambient noise tomography, its application in detecting objects at different scales and the progress of new methods and technologies. It is expected that the background noise imaging method will play an increasingly important role in studying the structure of earth space by using surface wave and body wave signals, and monitoring the activity of underground media by using time-shift imaging.