The inverse black body radiation problem, which is to reconstruct the area tempera-ture distribution from the measurement of power spectrum distribution, is a well-known ill-posed problem. In this paper, a variational expectation-maximization (EM) method is developed and its convergence is studied. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the variational EM method is more efficient and accurate than the traditional methods, in-cluding the Tikhonov regularization method, the Landweber method and the conjugate gradient method.