In this paper, the ill-posed inverse problem of surface waves caused by a two-dimensional pulsating pressure distribution on the free surface is studied using the regularization method. In order to exemplify the method, a cosine pressure distribution on a limited range of the undisturbed free surface is considered. By taking the resulting horizontal velocity as input data, the corresponding pressure is determined numerically by three different regularization schemes. It is found that the iterated Tikhonov method provides with the most accurate result, while solutions obtained from the Landweber-Friedman regularization are most stable.