The filtering tasks that are conventionally applied in a video monitoring application, to distinguish images that may be relevant to the application, are distributed to the image source, or near-source devices. Source devices, such as cameras and playback devices, and near-source devices, such as video concentrators and streaming devices, are configured to include video processing tools that can be used to pre-filter the image data to identify frames or segments of frames that include image information that is likely to be relevant to the receiving video monitoring application. In this manner, the receiving processor need not spend time and resources processing images that are pre-determined to be irrelevant to the receiving application.