A Novel Perception Entropy Metric for Optimizing Vehicle Perception with LiDAR Deployment

Developing an effective evaluation metric is crucial for accurately and swiftly measuring LiDAR perception performance. One major issue is the lack of metrics that can simultaneously generate fast and accurate evaluations based on either object detection or point cloud data. In this study, we propose a novel LiDAR perception entropy metric based on the probability of vehicle grid occupancy. This metric reflects the influence of point cloud distribution on vehicle detection performance. Based on this, we develop a LiDAR deployment optimization model, which is solved using a differential evolution-based particle swarm optimization algorithm. A comparative experiment demonstrated that the proposed PE-VGOP offers a correlation of more than 0.98 with the vehicle detection results in evaluating LiDAR perception performance. Furthermore, compared to base deployments, field experiments indicate that the proposed optimization model can significantly enhance the perception performance of various types of LiDARs, including RS-16, RS-32, and RS-80. Notably, it achieves a 25% increase in detection Recall for the RS-32 LiDAR. Additionally, sensitivity analysis under varying traffic densities further verifies the robustness of the proposed model. This study provides a practical and generalizable framework for enhancing roadside LiDAR deployment in diverse traffic environments.