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I have been looking for information on what brand and/or models of web cameras that I could use for my Linux System (CentOS 5).Please do help me...

The webcam given out in the CMU humanoids class is a Labtec Webcam. For those curious, the vendorid/productid is 0x46d/0x870. It seems to be supported by the qce-ga driver. There aren't any debian/redhat/whatever packages available to my knowledge, but the installation from source is pretty simple. Read the README file and run quickcam.sh in the top directory.

I've managed to run the camera at 320x240 at 5.67fps using most any colorspace except YUV420/422. A higher framerate should really be possible (what can it achieve in windows?), so this might be a driver limitation. The maximum resolution appears to be 352x292, with smaller resolutions just cropping the image.

The image quality isn't fabulous (and presumably worse than the windows driver can achieve), but it's surely adequate for a lot of experimentation. Some practical advice might be to try running the camera in black and white mode (i.e., by selecting grayscale in the capture library you're using), since most vision algorithms use intensity (grayscale) images anyway and skipping the intermediate grayscale conversions improves the image quality somewhat. You might also want to fiddle with the camera settings using the "qcset" utility included in the driver distribution. Another piece of advice, especially when trying vision algorithms for motion processing, is to move the camera verrry slowly to avoid blurring effects that can break your algorithm.

If anyone discovers a better driver or some way to make things work better than I've here described, let me know, and I'll post that here.