Worldwide, oral cancer is one of the most common cancers. Even with easy access to the oral cavity and significant improvements in treatment, oral cancer death rates remain high, primarily due to late-stage diagnoses and less successful treatments. The best way to treat cancer is to detect it early, and oral cancer is among the most expensive types in the United States. Patients’ survival rates are improved, and medical costs are reduced when early diagnosis occurs. Numerous techniques have been investigated by researchers for detecting oral malignancies in the early stages. An extensive review of the various methods analyzed by researchers to detect oral cancer at an early stage is presented in the paper. An overview of algorithms used for each step of cancer detection algorithms is provided, along with a comparison of different methods for cancer identification and classification.