Thermal ablation technique has become an important means for tumor treatment. Image navigation is an indispensable guarantee for accurate targeting of thermal ablation therapies. In this paper, the recent advances in image navigation techniques for tumor thermal ablation are reviewed and discussed, including multimodality image registration and fusion techniques, electromagnetic/optical tracking techniques, navigation systems, and ablation robot techniques. The future developments of multi-modality registration are high-precision, robust, fast, automatic, and non-rigid. Electromagnetic tracking with higher precision and larger effective range are the future direction of tracking systems. Commercial electromagnetic/optical tracking systems and navigation systems have not been developed in China, so we hope that such systems will be produced in China in the future. Considerable works have been conducted for ablation robots in China, however, the precision and safety must be improved before clinical application.