Polarization is the fourth important “information dimension” parameter in addition to intensity, wavelength and phase to describe the basic properties of electromagnetic waves. The polarization characteristics of reflected or radiated light are closely related to its material, geometry, structure and surface roughness, and physicochemical properties. Polarimetric optical imaging is a novel optical imaging method based on detecting the polarization information of light, which takes advantages of the difference in polarization characteristics between the reflected light and the background stray light to improve the target imaging quality, increase the action distance, enhance the detection capability and the identification probability. As an effective complementary means to the intensity, spectral and infrared imaging methods, polarimetric optical imaging has important applications for target detection in complex background environments with low signal-to-noise ratio, strong scattering and low illumination environments. Based on the authors' years of research work in polarimetric optical imaging and detection, this paper provides a more detailed introduction to the research status of polarimetric optical imaging including the related devices, technologies and applications. We present a comprehensive analysis and introduction of the polarimetric optical imaging technology and camera, the development and the application status at home and abroad. There are mainly two types of the polarimetric optical imaging regimes, which include the division-of time polarimetric optical imaging system and the simultaneous polarimetric optical imaging system, the later one can be further classified into the division-of-amplitude system, the division-of-aperture system, and the division-of-focal-plane system. The Stoke matrix representation of polarized light closely related to polarimetric imaging and the basic imaging principle are briefly introduced. Some research works conducted by our research team in polarimetric camera development and polarimetric optical imaging detection are summarized in detail, involving the design and key devices as well as technologies of the division-of-aperture polarimetric imaging system, the information processing technologies and algorithms and applications of polarization image. To be more specific, we introduce a novel division-of-aperture chromatic polarimetric camera with full-polarization-state simultaneous detection, i.e., including three linearly polarized states (0°,45°,and 90°) and one right circularly polarized state. We also introduce a division-of-aperture polarimetric lens with full-polarization-state simultaneous detection, which can be easily assembled to a commercial camera to change it into a polarimetric camera. We solve the image registration problem in division-of-aperture polarimetric camera by combining the phase-only correlation algorithm, the Speeded-up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm, and the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. We propose a novel polarimetric optical imaging regime, namely the division-of-aperture simultaneous system based on the specifically designed color-polarizer filter, which is used for coding both the spectrum and the polarization. We report our research works on the polarimetric dehazing/descattering imaging for fog and/or underwater environments based on the optimization of the Angle of Polarization (AoP), and the low-pass filter denoising. We also introduce image enhancement algorithms for target imaging, detection and/or identification, where the visible and the near-infrared polarimetric images are fused, or the high-resolution polarized images are reconstructed from the low-resolution polarized images, together with obtaining the high-resolution Degree of Polarization (DoP) image and the high-resolution AoP image. We show the physical model of the polarization 3D reconstruction imaging, together with its basic theory, method and the 3D imaging experimental results. We show some thoughts, suggestions and/or problems on the current techniques and development directions that need to be solved in polarimetric optical imaging research, which include the enhancement of the polarization measurement precision, the optimization design of the polarimetric optical imaging system, the advantages development/extension of the computational optical imaging techniques based on polarimetric image processing and optimization, and the applications of polarimetric optical imaging and detection techniques, etc.