The inverse synthetic aperture lidar(ISAL) have attracted increasing attention for its merits including small visual tracking which is considered as one of the important research topics in the field of computer vision due to its key role in versatile applications, such as precision guidance, intelligent video surveillance, human-computer interaction, robot navigation and public safety. The basic idea for implementing visual tracking is composed of finding the target object in a video or sequence of images, then determining its exact position in the next successive frames and finally generating the corresponding trajectory of this object. Visual tracking, however, is still a challenging problem in practice while taking into account the abrupt appearance changes of the target objects induced by their non-rigid transformation, the sophisticated lighting variation, the obstruction by the block or similar objects in the background and the camera jitter. Motivated by the successful applications in target detection and recognition in recent years, plenty of deep learning models have been integrated in the visual tracking and better performance over traditional methods was achieved in a series of data evaluations, which opens a new door in the field of visual tracking. In this paper, the overview and progress on visual tracking were summarized. The current challenges and corresponding solving approaches in this field are introduced firstly and in particular, several novel and mainstream visual tracking algorithms based on the deep learning are specially described and analyzed in details, including their basic ideas, advantages and disadvantages and future prospect.