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The involvement of ultrasound technology in the food industry started approximately 60 years ago when it was introduced as a non-invasive fat detection sensor for meat grading purposes. With the contribution of knowledge from previous researchers, ultrasound fat measurement techniques is now being prepared not only to be used in industries (controlled environment) but also commercially by the consumer in their homes (uncontrolled environment). In order to ensure this, an understanding about the relationship between ultrasound properties and composition of meat is needed.Ultrasound attenuates, reflect and refract during its propagation in a medium. These phenomena occur due to the losses within and in homogeneities of the medium. This paper presents the results of a literature review that analyses research in this area from 1990 to 2012. Based on this review, several parameters have been identified as factors that affect measurement; which are water content, measurement temperature, in homogeneity of sample due to the natural variation of sample and unwanted signal called speckle in the B -mode image. Minimizing this issue becomes the objective in order to realize the application of ultrasound fat measurement commercially by the consumer.

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The objective of this research is to develop a low cost non invasive method to measure fat content in burgers using Near-Infrared Radiation (NIR) sensor. The results of the fat measurement from this non invasive method were then compared to the results of fat measurement using a proven method. The Soxhlet method is a standard fat measurement procedure recommended by the Association of Official Analytical Chemist (AOAC). The samples used in this investigation are beef and fish burgers. The experimental results showed that there is correlation between fat content and the output voltage from the infrared sensor. This indicates that fat measurement using the infrared measurement technique can be used to determine fat content in burgers with reasonable accuracy by controlling several parameters such as ambient temperature, surrounding light, thickness and water content of the samples.

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