An inverse radiation analysis was presented for simultaneous estimation of the radiative source term and absorption coefficient distribution in the plume of hydrogen-oxygen rocket motor from the knowledge of a single ultraviolet radiation image captured by the CCD camera.Considering the plume as absorbing-emitting cylindrical symmetry media with transparent boundaries

after applying Abel transform to the image data

the inverse problem was formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the errors between the radiation intensities calculated and the experimental data with Abel transform

and the conjugate gradient method was used to solve the optimization problem.The effects of measurement errors on the accuracy of the estimation were investigated

and the measured data were simulated by adding random errors to the exact solution of the direct problem.Test results show that the radiation characteristic parameters can be estimated accurately

even for data with measurement error.