Abiotic stress refers to the abiotic factors that have adverse effects on plants and threatens plants germination, growth, development and reproduction and hinders crops cultivation and agricultural sustainable development. Plants stress precision management and stress-resistance breeding are effective ways to alleviate and solve stress, in which plant phenotyping is an indispensable segment, but traditional lagged methods such as artificial destructive phenotype measurement are difficult to obtain high throughput phenotypes and restrict plant stress management precision and modern breeding efficiency. High throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) technology, aims to acquire and analyze complex plant traits quickly, automatically and nondestructively, could rapidly monitor plant status in situ for precision input to control abiotic stress and could also provide solutions for high throughput screening and identification for excellent varieties and phenotype big data for revelation & mapping of resistance genes and genetic variation analysis. Latterly, imaging spectroscopy had shown good potential in high-throughput plant phenotyping due to its advantages in real-time, noninvasive and repeatable measurement for multiple phenotypes and had been widely used in precision agriculture and breeding. The papers mainly introduced the studies of high-throughput plant phenotyping for abiotic stress by imaging spectroscopy including visible light imaging (RGB), multispectral imaging (MSI), hyperspectral imaging (HSI), chlorophyll fluorescence imaging (ChlFI), multispectral fluorescence imaging (MFI) and thermal infrared imaging (TIRI) and estimated their development trends. Firstly, the technical characteristics and application differences for plant phenotyping and high-throughput plant phenotyping frameworks of imaging spectroscopy were briefly introduced. Secondly, some recent studies on plants stress monitoring, plant varieties screening & identification, genetic analysis for drought, temperature, salinity, nutrient and other stress by imaging spectroscopy were summarized. Finally, the chances and challenges of imaging spectroscopy in high-throughput plant phenotyping for abiotic stress were discussed.