Phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometer (Φ-OTDR) is widely used in the field of distributed vibration monitoring due to its long sensing distance, simple laying, corrosion resistance and anti-electromagnetic interference. With the diversification of sensing tasks and the wide application of artificial intelligence, the type recognition of vibration events has become a hot research direction. In order to enable readers to better understand the research progress and development trend of recognition classifiers, this paper introduces the traditional recognition classifiers and the neural network recognition classifiers based on deep learning, compares the performance indexes, advantages and disadvantages of different classifiers and their applications, and finally prospects the research direction of Φ-OTDR vibration event recognition.