Abstract: Rayleigh waves have played an important role in detection of earth internal structure, near surface geophysical engineering, and ultrasonic nondestructive testing. In particular, in recent years a number of studies have explored shallow soil profiles for near surface applications. The main achievements and progress of near surface elastic Rayleigh wave exploration worldwide are summarized. Analyzing the existing research results, we find that current Rayleigh wave research focus on reconstruction of one dimension shear-wave velocity profiles and estimation of geomechanical parameters by single-objective phase velocity dispersion curve inversion of single-component surface waves, which is based on horizontally layered elastic earth model. As a result, this will lead to mode misidentification of multimode dispersion curves, not fully utilizing multicomponent phase velocities and group velocities, or elliptical polarization characteristics of multicomponent surface waves when multimode phase velocity dispersion curves of single-component Rayleigh waves are inverted by single-objective optimization scheme. To deal with challenging difficulties and obstacles presented by previous literature reviews, the future main research directions of near surface elastic Rayleigh waves are proposed to focus on full velocity spectrum (FVS) inversion of multimode surface waves, multi-offset multicomponent phase velocity analysis of surface waves, single-offset multicomponent group velocity analysis of surface waves, single-offset multicomponent polarization analysis of surface waves. This research will present new theories and its methodologies on multicomponent FVS inversion of near surface Rayleigh waves by multi-objective optimizer, will expand conventional theories of single-objective inversion of single-component surface waves, and will promote the progress of high-precision multicomponent surface wave exploration for near surface applications.