The gas temperature field measurement is crucial for the monitoring of the objects of interest. Owing to the distinct advantages, including non-invasive sensing, high safety, etc., the ultrasonic tomography (UT) method is considered to be a promising visualization measurement method, in which acquiring high-quality images is vital for real-world applications. In this paper, a new UT measurement system that integrates the Data Acquisition Card and a Single Chip Microcomputer is proposed for the temperature distribution measurement. A hardware system is designed to alleviate the inertia delay phenomenon. A reconstruction model that simultaneously emphasizes the inaccurate properties on the reconstruction model and the measurement data is proposed. By means of introducing the radial basis function method and the framework of the Tikhonov regularization technique, a two-stage reconstruction method is proposed to alleviate the ill-posed nature in the UT inverse problem. A new objective functional is proposed to convert the original reconstruction task into an optimization problem, and the simulated annealing algorithm is deployed to effectively solve the proposed objective functional. Experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed reconstruction method. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.