Visual tracking plays a very important role in computer science and engineering. It offers enormous benefits to research communities in computer science. This paper reviews recent augmented reality works which have been presented in various leading laboratories around the world. We categorized the methods of visual tracking into two main groups. The first group is color-based tracking. The second group is feature-based tracking. Then we discussed each research in detail and suggest the pros and the cons of each technique. We recommend that the selected method should be determined by the purpose of each augmented reality application. This is because color-based tracking and feature-based tracking will work well in different situations. In the future, we believe that the successful visual tracking researches could further shape the promising innovation of computer science society.