As a new research focus in biometrics, palm vein recognition has attracted people's attention because of high security, liveness-detection, user acceptability and convenience. Palm vein recognition exhibits high security, as it uses the network of blood vessels underneath palm skin for recognition. As palm vein is interior biological information of the body, vein patterns are much harder for intruders to copy compared to other biometric features. Palm vein is mostly invisible to the human eyes; they are commonly captured under near-infrared light. Under its natural state, the veins of the palm are concealed naturally and, for most of time people's hands are in the gesture of half fist. This study presents a comprehensive overview of recent research progress of palm vein recognition, from the basic background knowledge to data acquisition, public database, preprocessing, feature extraction and matching. In addition, the study focuses on palm vein-related fusion. Ultimately, the authors discuss the challenges and future perspectives in palm vein recognition for further works.