夜间灯光遥感是能够探测夜间微光的光学遥感技术，可获取白天遥感无法获取的信息。由于城市区域的人造光源是夜间稳定亮光的主要来源，夜间灯光遥感影像已被证明可以更直观地反映夜间人类活动差异，同时具有覆盖范围大、时效快和易获取等优势，可广泛应用于多尺度长时序的城市问题研究。目前，基于夜间灯光遥感数据的应用研究成果较为丰富，不少学者对夜间灯光遥感数据的数据预处理以及应用潜力等方面进行了归纳。但基于夜间灯光遥感与城市问题研究的整理和总结还有待进一步加强。基于此，本文通过对近几十年来有关夜间灯光遥感数据的研究成果进行了详细梳理，从多尺度城市空间结构分析、城市社会经济指标估算以及城市公共安全领域研究3方面入手，系统梳理夜间灯光遥感数据的应用能力。进一步根据数据应用过程中出现的问题，从夜间灯光遥感日数据应用、长时间序列数据集生产以及定量验证等角度探讨了夜间灯光遥感所面临的挑战与前景。

Nighttime light remote sensing is a unique optical remote sensing technology that can record ground object radiation information at night that cannot be obtained by daytime remote sensing. Given that artificial light in urban areas is the main source of stable nighttime light, nighttime light remote sensing images have been proven to reflect the variation in human activities at night. At the same time, they have extensive coverage, are time intensive and readily available, and have widely been a proxy for urban studies on the multi-scale or long-term analysis. The application related to the nighttime light data is growing at present. However, most reviews have focused on the preprocessing and potential application of nighttime light data, and the summary of nighttime light data in urban studies is still limited. In this study, we reviewed nighttime light-related research in three aspects: multi-scale analysis of the urban spatial structure, multi-scale estimation of urban socio-economic indicators, and research in urban public security. Three challenges, namely, the application of nighttime light data with a short time interval, the generation of longer nighttime light time series, and the quantitative validation, are also discussed to explore the potential applications in the future.