This study proposes an inverse heat conduction methodology for laser heating treatment of a thin cylinder bonded to a strain gauge. The shifting function method is applied twice to respectively generate analytical solutions of temperature and thermal strain functions by giving the general type of unknown temperature function at the heated end. Afterwards we used the least-squares method to minimize the difference between theoretical calculated strains and the measured strains at an interior location at the discrete measurement times; therefore, the whole temperature and heat flux functions of laser heating process can be directly generated. The proposed methodology benefits the researches by avoiding complex numerical operations, reducing the rank of the coefficient matrix of the least-squares method from five to three, and setting the strain gauge on the cylinder surface easily. At last, one mathematical and one experimental examples are used to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of this work via using thermal strain measurements. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.