cmos image sensor to usb

Hello, I'm working on a personal project where I'd like to basically make m own webcam from scratch. I am looking for a camera in the VGA/15fp range. The most important factor in my design is form factor. I'd lik to make it as "pencil-like" as possible. For example, I basically wan something like this

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from Aurora Optical, but I want to be able to put the sensor on a fle circuit and have the processor/USB chip behind the sensor. Can anybod out there help point me in the right direction? I have a EE background but no experience with image sensors or USB. I've looked at the OV511 US bridge, but in general, I haven't found much documentation on a complet sensor-to-USB solution. Would this be a relatively straightforwar design? In other words, if I want my own "thin" form factor, wha components do I need to go from sensor-to-USB as easily as possible? Ar there any good resources on "howto build a webcam?" I've looked, but haven't found much.

Thanks in advance! Mike

this:

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Webcams are built as essentially two-chip solutions. Both chips are application-specific; one is the image sensor, and the other is an "image processor". ST for instance makes both classes of part. The image processor has hardware that acquires the image sensor data, processes it (basically, handles the fact that it's really a monochrome sensor with a Bayer or similar filter on top of it), then compresses to JPEG data one stripe at a time. It also has the USB magic in it.

It is fairly challenging to connect a raw image sensor directly to a general-purpose microcontroller. High-speed interfacing, precision timing and a lot of memory are required, because if you're doing everything in software you have no time to acquire-convert-compress a stripe at a time; you have to grab the whole raw image, process it en bloc, and compress it en bloc.