Limited processing power and memory prevent realization of state of the art algorithms on the edge level. Offloading computations to the cloud comes with tradeoffs as compression techniques employed to conserve transmission bandwidth and energy adversely impact accuracy of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose collaborative processing to actively guide the output of the sensor to improve performance on the end application. We apply this methodology to smart surveillance specifically the task of object detection from video. Perceptual quality and object detection performance is characterized and improved under a variety of channel conditions.