Tilapia has the advantages of hypoxia tolerance, disease resistance capacity, rapid growth, and reproduction, and its nutritional value is high (Wang et al., 2019). In recent years, China became the top producers in the world to cultivate tilapia (FAO, 2017). In addition, in global fish farming, tilapia is the most popular farmed fish (Duan et al., 2011). But tilapia has high water content, and tilapia is apt to be highly spoilage when it is affected by enzymes and microorganisms (Kituu et al., 2010;Li et al., 2017), which can potentially result in substantial economic losses. In order to increase tilapia shelf life and maintain the quality of the tilapia products, it is of great necessary to dry for tilapia. At present, the methods of drying tilapia mainly include hot air-drying (HAD), microwave drying (MD), hot air-microwave combined drying (HAMCD), heat pump drying (HPD), vacuum microwave drying (VMD), and vacuum freeze-drying (VFD). Among these methods, the vacuum freeze-drying (VFD) is the best method of water removal for all kinds of foods, but its operation cost is high (Duan et al., 2010). Therefore, it is limited to use. Vacuum freeze-drying (VFD) is only used when it provides a reasonable added value to the products or the costly materials are dried (Ratti, 2001).In order to improve the quality of the products and reduce the drying time, it is necessary to pretreat the samples and combine two drying techniques to dry tilapia fillets. The previous research found that the quality of tilapia fillets by ultrasound-assisted polydextrose osmotic vacuum freezing-heat pump combined drying (UAPOVFHPCD) is close to the quality of that by vacuum freeze-drying; moreover, compared with vacuum freeze-drying, it took less time. In addition,