Book chapter: OBIA history and futures

Blaschke, Thomas, Maggi Kelly, and Helena Merschdorf. Object-Based Image Analysis: Evolution, History, State of the Art, and Future Vision. Chapter 14 in Prasad Thenkabail (Editor) Remotely Sensed Data Characterization, Classification, and Accuracies. Taylor & Francis. 678 pp.

More fun with Thomas Blaschke delving into the history of obia and discussing possible new developments. An except of my bit on the Colwell-era antecedants of OBIA: 

The conceptual foundations of OBIA are rooted in the 1960s with predigital aerial photography. e spatial information found in digital imagery that is harnessed in the object-based approach, for example, image texture, contextual information, pixel proximity, and geometric attributes of features, were discussed in the 1960s as possible components to yet possible automation of photo interpretation. In his seminal work on aerial photography and early remote sensing applications, Colwell (1965) describes the photo interpretation process as the act of examining photographic images for the purpose of identifying objects and judging their significance. He said that photo interpretation involves the observation of the size, shape, shadow, tone, texture, pattern, and location of the features, as well as the significance of the features, based largely on their interrelationships or association (Colwell 1965). His assessment of the potential for automation of an object recognition process depended on the capacities of a digital scanner and the ability of an algorithm to assess the differences, in photographic tone, between a "blob" and its surroundings (Colwell 1964, 1965). Colwell was an important advisor on the Landsat 1 mission, and his ideas on extraction of meaningful features transferred to his ambitions for the satellite missions (Colwell 1973). 

Book website.