Here's a (rather) selected background reading list (Zotero group library). This is far from comprehensive, with only 28 items, but not too bad as a primer.
For those new to VMI, start with the fundamentals category, which has a couple of the classic references.
The other categories contain some more recent literature that we've found useful locally, mainly for femtosecond UV pump-probe type work, and more recent technological developments in image analysis and 3D imaging.
Hopefully this list will be useful to people... and will grow to cover a larger range of categories/use-cases. Please add comments below, or additional references directly to the library page on Zotero (it's open for public editing), with anything else that you think is a key resource.
Here's the full list (note that the BibBase import shown here doesn't include the categories):