A one-dimensional photothermal model of multilayer media is established based on thermal-wave impedance method, and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method and total variation (TV) regularization are employed to reconstruct the depth profile of thermal properties of the multilayer media by the analysis of the surface photothermal signals. In the proposed method, the multilayer media is discretized into a series of virtual layers with the same thickness, the depth profiles of thermal properties of the multilayer media are represented in the form of particle, and the optimized thermal parameters are obtained by the particles′ searching in the solution space. The numerical results demonstrate that the algorithm presented in this paper is very effective, and suited to reconstructing thermal conductivity or thermal diffusivity profiles of a multilayer media with unknown number of layers. It is also proved that the algorithm is stable even with noise disturbance. Moreover, the simulation results also show simultaneous profile reconstruction of thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity is feasible by using the inversion method.