Accurate classification of dry bean varieties is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity, ensuring seed quality, and supporting market standardization. Traditional classification methods are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to error, particularly when dealing with morphologically similar varieties. While recent data-driven approaches have shown promising performances, they often suffer from limited varietal representation, inadequate handling of high-resolution image data, and suboptimal dimensionality reduction techniques. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel hybrid classification pipeline that integrates a fine-tuned InceptionV3 for low- and high-level feature extraction, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for efficient dimensionality reduction, and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for final classification. The model was evaluated on a comprehensive dataset combining 14 dry bean varieties from Dogan et al. with five locally sourced varieties, totaling 19 distinct classes. Extensive experimental results showed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 94.00% and 80.01% on benchmark and combined datasets, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.
