The present paper reviews the progress in the methods of retrieving vegetation water content using remote sensing spectral information, including vegetation spectral reflectance information (VIR, SWIR, and NIR) to directly extract vegetation water content and establish vegetation water indices (WI), i. e. NDWI = (R860 - R1 240)/(R860 + R1 240) and PWI = R970/R900; and using radiation transfer (RT) model such as PROSPAIL to detect plant water content information. The authors analyze the method of retrieving vegetation water content under low crop coverage condition. The plant water can be estimated by using canopy physiological parameters firstly, and using vegetation indices and radiation transfer model secondly, which can eliminate soil background effect. The estimated agricultural drought and vegetation water content by using multi-angle polarized reflectance and bi-directional reflectance (BRDF) was discussed in this paper. In the end, the possible development trend of retrieval methods for plant water information under plant low coverage conditions was discussed.