During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the total fishery production in China is expected to continue to grow, and aquatic products further become an important dietary component for consumers. However, it is highly likely to lead to food safety incidents due to irregularities in the breeding, processing and cooking processes. Spectroscopy has become a hot spot for aquatic product testing technology because of its advantages of rapid, nondestructive, and high-test reproducibility, reflecting both the spectral properties of objects and the spatial information of samples, but mostly focusing on freshness testing. This paper reviews the literature related to the application and progress of spectroscopic techniques in foreign matter residues of aquatic products in the past 10 years. It introduces the common spectroscopic techniques in their application and progress from four aspects: fishbone detection, adulteration analysis, parasite detection and heavy metal detection, mainly including X-Ray technology, visible imaging, near-infrared imaging, hyperspectral imaging, etc. While introducing the current problems, we look forward to the development of spectroscopic techniques in aquatic products. The development prospect of foreign substance residue detection: traditional detection algorithms are further optimized, and multi-spectral technology is used for foreign substance residue detection of aquatic products; the great advantage of deep learning in feature extraction is applied, and the application field of spectral technology in foreign substance residue detection of aquatic products is studied more deeply; the organic integration of spectral technology and multiple detection technologies becomes an inevitable trend, and online real-time detection becomes possible.