The refined description of the flow field information around a ship can provide feedback on the internal essence of the ship's macroscopic hydrodynamic performance from the perspective of the flow mechanism, and high-quality flow field measurement technology is a necessary means of ensuring such a refined description of the flow field. Based on the engineering requirements of ship flow field measurement, the current development status of flow field measurement technology is summarized according to its technical characteristics, and the applications and characteristics of each method are described in detail. The existing flow field measurement methods still have many problems that need to be solved. The exploration of hardware upgrading, technology integration, algorithm optimization, function expansion, data assimilation and machine learning may promote the rapid development of flow field measurement technology in the direction of comprehensiveness, specialization and efficiency.