<![CDATA[Areca nut (Areca catechu L.) maturity is one of the factors affecting harvest quality. Visual maturity identification still has limitations because it can be influenced by observer subjectivity and environmental conditions. This study aims to classify areca nut maturity levels using a Hybrid Deep Feature Fusion approach by combining ResNet50 and EfficientNetB0 as feature extractors with XGBoost as the classification algorithm. The dataset used in this study was a primary dataset consisting of 1,200 areca nut images categorized into three maturity classes: unripe, semi-ripe, and ripe. The research stages included image preprocessing, feature extraction using CNN models, feature combination through feature concatenation, classification using XGBoost, and performance evaluation using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, confusion matrix, and 5-Fold Cross Validation. The experimental results showed that ResNet50 + XGBoost and Hybrid Deep Feature Fusion + XGBoost achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score values of 100%, while EfficientNetB0 + XGBoost achieved an accuracy of 99.16%. These results indicate that CNN-based features are able to represent the visual characteristics of areca nut images in the dataset used. The Hybrid Deep Feature Fusion approach provides an analysis of feature combination from two different CNN architectures, although increasing the feature dimensions does not always improve evaluation performance when a single feature extractor is already capable of representing dataset characteristics effectively. Future research can be conducted by increasing dataset variations to evaluate the generalization capability of the method under more diverse environmental conditions.]]>
