Semantic segmentation was traditionally performed using primitive methods; however, in recent times, a significant growth in the advancement of deep learning techniques for the same is observed. In this paper, an extensive study and review of the existing deep learning (DL)-based techniques used for the purpose of semantic segmentation is carried out along with a summary of the datasets and evaluation metrics used for the same. The paper begins with a general and broader focus on semantic segmentation as a problem and further narrows its focus on existing DL-based approaches for this task. In addition to this, a summary of the traditional methods used for semantic segmentation is also presented towards the beginning. Since the problem of scene understanding is being vastly explored in the computer vision community, especially with the help of semantic segmentation, the authors believe that this paper will benefit active researchers in reviewing and studying the existing state-of-the-art as well as advanced methods for the same.