This may not be specific to your case (I’m not an “OpenCV guy”), but generally you need the base version of a library such as OpenCV in order to run code or to link against it. Since you are running on a Jetson, only the Jetson would need this to run OpenCV. To compile against OpenCV you’d also need the dev package (which provides headers). If you compile on the Jetson, then this is where you need it.
As soon as you go to cross compile, then you need cross compiler tools on the host. For a user space application (basically anything other than kernel or boot loader), you also need support (cross) tools to do linking. What the linking works with implies your host will have to have a cross-architecture install of OpenCV…this isn’t really installed on your host for your host to run, all it does is make the files visible for the cross-linker and cross-compiler to see…these are called foreign architecture because the native host cannot use those files directly, only cross-architecture tools understanding the foreign architecture would know what to do with them (those files if placed on the Jetson become native architecture instead of foreign).
Basically you need to either compile on Jetson with dev packages plus base libraries, or you need to cross-compile with a copy of those same files set up as a foreign architecture on your host. Native compile on the Jetson simplifies life, but if you use nsight, then you have to set it up for remote build instead of cross-compile…eclipse works with both types of work flow.