The present disclosure provides image capture devices and associated methods that feature intelligent use of hardware-generated statistics. An example image capture device can include an imaging hardware pipeline that generates frames of imagery. The imaging hardware pipeline can generate one or more hardware-generated statistics based at least in part on, for example, the raw image data captured by the image sensor or intermediate image data within the pipeline. The image capture device can analyze the hardware-generated statistics to determine one or more metrics for the raw image data or the image. The image capture device can determine a downstream operation of the image capture device relative to the image based at least in part on the metrics determined from the hardware generated statistics.