An inverse radiation analysis is presented for simultaneous estimation of temperature field and radiative properties including absorption and scattering coefficients in a two-dimensional rectangular, absorbing, emitting and scattering gray medium from the knowledge of the exit radiative energy received by charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras at boundary surfaces. The backward Monte Carlo method was introduced to describe the radiative heat transfer for its efficiency. The inverse problem is formulated as an optimization problem and solved by the least-square QR decomposition (LSQR) method. The effects of measurement errors, optical thickness and search step length on the accuracy of the estimation were investigated and the results show that the temperature field and radiative properties can be reconstructed accurately for the exact and noisy data. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.