Smart camera systems integrating multi-model image sensors provide better spectral sensitivity and hence better pass-fail decisions. In a given vision system, pre-processing tasks have a ripple effect on output data and pass-fail decision of high level tasks such as feature extraction, classification and recognition. In this work, we investigated four pre-processing pipelines and evaluated the effect on classification accuracy and output transmission data. The pre-processing pipelines processed four types of images, thermal grayscale, thermal binary, visual and visual binary. The results show that the pre-processing pipeline, which transmits visual compressed Region of Interest (ROI) images, offers 13 to 64 percent better classification accuracy as compared to thermal grayscale, thermal binary and visual binary. The results show that visual raw and visual compressed ROI with suitable quantization matrix offers similar classification accuracy but visual compressed ROI offers up to 99 percent reduced communication data as compared to visual ROI.