InSPE: Rapid Evaluation of Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Infrastructure Sensor Placement

Infrastructure sensing is vital for traffic monitoring at safety hotspots (e.g., intersections) and serves as the backbone of cooperative perception in autonomous driving. While vehicle sensing has been extensively studied, infrastructure sensing has received little attention, especially given the unique challenges of diverse intersection geometries, complex occlusions, varying traffic conditions, and ambient environments like lighting and weather. To address these issues and ensure cost-effective sensor placement, we propose Heterogeneous Multi-Modal Infrastructure Sensor Placement Evaluation (InSPE), a perception surrogate metric set that rapidly assesses perception effectiveness across diverse infrastructure and environmental scenarios with combinations of multi-modal sensors. InSPE systematically evaluates perception capabilities by integrating three carefully designed metrics, i.e., sensor coverage, perception occlusion, and information gain. To support large-scale evaluation, we develop a data generation tool within the CARLA simulator and also introduce Infra-Set, a dataset covering diverse intersection types and environmental conditions. Benchmarking experiments with state-of-the-art perception algorithms demonstrate that InSPE enables efficient and scalable sensor placement analysis, providing a robust solution for optimizing intelligent intersection infrastructure.