The choice of the regularization parameter plays a very important role in the inverse radiation problem of temperature distribution in participating medium and in practice the regularization parameter is not easy to determine accurately, which can directly affect the reconstruction accuracy and introduce errors into reconstruction results. This paper presents the alleviation of non-optimal regularization parameter influence on the temperature distribution reconstruction accuracy in participating medium using coupled methods, i.e., two kinds of regularization method (least square QR decomposition (LSQR) method and truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) method) coupled with genetic algorithm (GA). The radiative heat transfer was described by the backward Monte Carlo method for its efficiency. Two kinds of temperature distributions with one peak and two peaks are considered. The results show that GA can still improve the accuracy of solutions even though the optimal regularization parameters are used in the coupled methods (LSQR-GA and TSVD-GA). GA can also reduce the temperature reconstruction errors due to the non-optimal choice of the regularization parameter and improve the accuracy of the reconstruction results in the coupled methods. Moreover, the coupled methods can even reach the same or better solutions accuracy for some samples with non-optimal regularization parameter, compared with the accuracy of solutions obtained by the single LSQR method or TSVD method with the optimal regularization parameter. This study demonstrates that the coupled method can alleviate non-optimal regularization parameter influence and obtain more accurate results for the inverse radiation problem of temperature distribution in participating medium. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.