LEAP-NBV: Lightweight Edge Active-Perception for Foundation-Model Next-Best-View Planning

Foundation models are endowing autonomous systems with greater intelligence, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the environment through visual perception. A representative example is Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), which provides useful estimates of a target's 3D pose and shape that can benefit tactical missions. However, the size and power demands of such models make them difficult to run on edge platforms and limit their real-time performance, undermining the requirements of tactical edge deployment - especially for active perception, where a mobile robot must plan its next-best view on-board and cannot offload computation under contested communications. We present LEAP-NBV, a lightweight active-perception framework that runs foundation-model-driven Next-Best-View (NBV) planning on-board an edge device. To this end, we distill a family of large HMR teachers, each into a compact 32M student, with an offline mesh objective, then quantize the vision encoder to FP16 and characterize its on-device accuracy and latency. Within an occlusion-aware active perception loop, we evaluate all configurations on the same held-out benchmark and deploy the end-to-end pipeline on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, reporting measured on-device latency and energy. Distillation recovers 6-7 mm of Procrustes-aligned mean per-vertex position error (PA-MPVPE) over the undistilled student on the test set. Selecting the edge-optimal compression model brings the HMR engine to ~12 ms at a small accuracy cost and runs the full closed loop at 3.6 FPS and 2.6 J per frame, achieving a 2.0x speedup and 3.0x lower energy than the uncompressed model while nearly matching downstream task quality.