Abstract: An effective and exact method was developed to evaluate intramuscular fat content. Marbling content feature wasgathered by image analysis with Matlab. Some physical and chemical indexes such as solid conductance rate, shear force, dry matter,ash etc were studied. The research showed that the indexes had high correlationship with intramuscular fat content. Those indexeswere used to predict intramuscular fat content by 3 different mathematical models, such as poly-linearity regression, non-linearity regression and artificial neural network. Among those 3 models, non-linearity regression model had highest veracity andits correct rate is above 85%.

Key words: high quality pork, intramuscular fat content, marbling, physical and chemical indexes