Indoor scene synthesis has become a popular topic in recent years. Synthesizing functional and plausible indoor scenes is an inherently difficult task since it requires considerable knowledge to both choose reasonable object categories and arrange objects appropriately. In this survey, we propose four criteria which group a wide range of 3D (three-dimensional) indoor scene synthesis techniques according to various aspects (specifically, four groups of categories). It also provides hints,through comprehensively comparing all the techniques to demonstrate their effectiveness and drawbacks, and discussions of potential remaining problems.