Abstract Learning meaningful representations is at the heart of many tasks in the field of modern machine learning. Recently, a lot of methods were introduced that allow learning of image representations without supervision. These representations can then be used in downstream tasks like classification or object detection. The quality of these representations is close to supervised learning, while no labeled images are needed. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of these methods in a unified notation, points out similarities and differences of these methods, and proposes a taxonomy which sets these methods in relation to each other. Furthermore, our survey summarizes the most recent experimental results reported in the literature in form of a meta-study. Our survey is intended as a starting point for researchers and practitioners who want to dive into the field of representation learning.