Automatic measurement of rice tiller angle from unmanned aerial vehicle images

Rice ( Oryza sativa L.) tiller angle is an important trait that influences plant architecture, canopy light interception, and yield potential. In this study, we proposed a deep learning‐based pipeline for automated measurement of rice tiller angle and plant base width using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. Our method leverages keypoint detection models to estimate tiller angles efficiently and accurately. We collected and annotated a dataset of UAV‐captured rice plant images for tiller angle estimation. We demonstrated that our approach provides scalable and precise measurement for keypoints under real‐world field conditions, achieving a mean average precision (mAP)@50 of 0.982 and a mAP@50:95 of 0.859 on the test set. Predicted tiller angle distribution aligns well with human annotations, with a mean absolute error of 5.3° across a range of 10.7°–27.8° and a Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.64, offering acceptable accuracy for tiller angle measurement in real‐world agricultural settings. Additionally, the predicted plant base width ranges from 2.8 to 5.5 cm, with a mean absolute error of 1.02 cm compared to human annotations, highlighting the model's capability for precise spatial analysis. Significant differences in tiller angle and plant base width were detected among 27 rice genotypes. These results validate the proposed pipeline's potential for accurate and efficient differentiation of plant architecture traits. This research is the first to measure the rice tiller angle directly from UAV images. It lays a foundation for automated phenotyping of plant architecture traits and has the potential for integration into plant phenotyping frameworks to further promote artificial intelligence‐driven rice research and production.