Retinotopic sampling and the Gabor decomposition have a well-established role in computer vision in general as well as in face authentication. The concept of Retinal Vision we introduce aims at complementing these biologically inspired tools with models of higher-order visual process, specifically the Human Saccadic System. We discuss the Saccadic Search strategy, a general purpose attentional mechanism that identifies semantically meaningful structures in images by performing "jumps" (saccades) between relevant locations. Saccade planning relies on a priori knowledge encoded by SVM classifiers. The raw visual input is analysed by means of a log-polar retinotopic sensor, whose receptive fields consist in a vector of modified Gabor filters designed in the log-polar frequency plane. Applicability to complex cognitive tasks is demonstrated by facial landmark detection and authentication experiments over the M2VTS and Extended M2VTS (XM2VTS) databases.