A typical inverse heat conduction problem(IHCP) is converted to an optimization problem.An inversion algorithm of adjoint equation method(AEM) is developed.In order to treat ill-posedness of IHCP,a stop criteria used in iterative regularization method is employed.In a typical case,the inversion method of AEM is feasible and not very sensitive to measurement noise as noise level is relatively low.As measurement noise presents,difference between estimated thermal conductivities and exact values at boundaries x=0 and x=L is significant,which is due to the fact that gradient of objective function with respect to the change of thermal conductivity at boundaries is relatively small.Moreover,further research shows that as noise level rises,significant difference between estimated and exact values of thermal conductivity presents and initial value has great influence on estimated values.