Abstract: Water is one of the most critical natural resources on the Earth, playing a crucial role in the survival and development of all living organisms. Utilizing remote sensing data for water body monitoring is helpful for environmental surveillance, water resource management, agricultural food production, and industrial activities, with water body extraction serving as a crucial prerequisite for effective water resource monitoring. This paper provides a comprehensive review of water body extraction methods based on medium-to-high resolution satellite imagery, analyzing current research hotspots from a bibliometric perspective and examining both data sources and extraction methodologies. In terms of data sources, optical remote sensing imagery offers broad coverage and long time series, making it suitable for large-scale and long-term water body monitoring despite limitations due to cloud cover; radar remote sensing imagery enables all-weather monitoring unaffected by clouds or fog, ideal for areas sensitive to weather conditions; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery provides high flexibility and resolution, particularly useful for disaster assessment and detailed extraction of water body boundaries, but may face regulatory and operational challenges. Regarding extraction methods, threshold segmentation methods utilize simple thresholding based on spectral indices like NDWI or MNDWI for computational efficiency, though with limited accuracy in complex environments; machine learning methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) offer improved precision by classifying pixels into water and non-water categories; deep learning methods achieve high accuracy rates exceeding 90% for water body extraction from medium-to-high resolution imagery, demonstrating superior performance. Finally, this review summarizes the shortcomings of current research, emphasizing the appropriate scenarios for each method and acknowledging their limitations while proposing future research directions and recommendations. These findings are crucial for advancing water resource management and environmental monitoring practices, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of water body extraction techniques from medium-to-high resolution imagery, which is essential for promoting sustainable water use and management globally.