Quantifying non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) is important for ecosystem management and studies on climate change, ecology, and hydrology because it controls uptake of carbon, water, and nutrients together with frequency and intensity of natural fire, and serves as wildlife habitat. The ecological importance of NPV has driven considerable research on quantitatively estimating NPV in diverse ecosystems including croplands, forests, grasslands, savannah, and shrublands using remote sensing data. However, a comprehensive review is not available. This review highlights the theoretical bases and the critical elements of remote sensing for NPV estimation, and summarizes research on estimating fractional cover of NPV (NPV cover) and biomass using passive optical hyperspectral and multispectral remote sensing data, active synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and integrated multi-sensorial data. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of optical, LiDAR, and SAR data and pinpoint future direction on NPV estimation using remote sensing data. Currently, most NPV research has been mainly focused on NPV cover, not NPV biomass, using passive optical data, while a few studies have used LiDAR data to quantify NPV biomass in forests and SAR data on NPV estimation in croplands and grasslands. In the future, more efforts should be made to estimate NPV biomass and to investigate the best use of hyperspectral, LiDAR, SAR data, and their integration. The upcoming new optical sensor on Sentinel-2 satellites, Radarsat-2 constellation and NovaSAR, technological innovation in hyperspectral, LiDAR, and SAR, and improvements on methodology for information extraction and combining multi-sensorial data will provide more opportunities for NPV estimation.