Among the full-field optical measurement methods, the Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is one of the techniques which has been given particular attention. Technically, the DIC technique refers to a non-contact strain measurement method that mathematically compares the grey intensity changes of the images captured at two different states: before and after deformation. The measurement can be performed by numerically calculating the displacement of speckles which are deposited on the top of object�s surface. In this paper, the Two-Dimensional Digital Image Correlation (2D-DIC) is presented and its fundamental concepts are discussed. Next, the development of the 2D-DIC algorithms in the past 33 years is reviewed systematically. The improvement of 2DDIC algorithms is presented with respect to two distinct aspects: their computation efficiency and measurement accuracy. Furthermore, analysis of the 2D-DIC accuracy is included, followed by a review of the DIC applications for two-dimensional measurements. © 2016 Polish Academy of Sciences.