With prominent advantages of rotation and scaling invariance and decreasing redundant information, etc., the features of human retina provides novel approaches for optical imaging and applications. The issue on the relationship among large filed of view, high resolution, real-time ability is well solved by the use of retina-like imaging mechanism. The retina-like imaging systems are widely used in the fields such as visual navigation, recognition and tracking, biomedical engineering. Meanwhile, the systems become small, efficiency and intelligent due to the fast development of semiconductor processing and computer processing techniques. The implementations of retina-like systems were compared, and the merit and demerit were summarized in the paper. Some typical practical applications were taken as example for presenting current research status. Opportunities and challenges were discussed for studying bio-inspired retina-like imaging further.