As the importance of safety and reliability in transportation engineering structures and other infrastructure continues to grow, structural health monitoring (SHM) has garnered increasing attention. SHM involves the use of sensors and other technological means to perform real-time monitoring of engineering structures, assessing their condition and safety performance throughout their service life to promptly detect potential damage and faults. Consequently, Optimal Sensor Placement (OSP) is a critical issue in SHM. To enhance the precision of monitoring systems and address the issue of traditional effective independence methods losing high-energy measurement points, this paper introduces information entropy into the high-energy effective independence method, proposing an improved high-energy effective independence approach. The effectiveness and applicability of this method were validated through experiments on a cantilever beam. In addition, the method can be widely used in the health monitoring of Bridges, tunnels, high-speed trains and other transportation infrastructure, which provides a strong technical support for transportation engineering.