The heat transfer mechanism for radiation is directly related to the emission of photons and electromagnetic waves. Depending on the participation of the medium, the radiation can be classified into two forms: surface and gas radiation. In the present study, unknown radiation properties were estimated using an inverse boundary analysis of surface radiation in an axisymmetric cylindrical enclosure. For efficiency, a repulsive particle swarm optimization (RPSO) algorithm, which is a relatively recent heuristic search method, was used as inverse solver. By comparing the convergence rates and accuracies with the results of a genetic algorithm (GA), the performances of the proposed RPSO algorithm as an inverse solver was verified when applied to the inverse analysis of the surface radiation problem.