An inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) related to the recovery of time-dependent coefficients of heat transfer on the tube surface by the data of temperature measurement at two inner points of the tube is considered. Heat transfer is described by the initial boundary-value problem for 1D nonlinear heat conduction equation. To solve the posed IHCP a modified method of suboptimal stage-by-stage optimization (SSO) that allows one to process the input data in a real time mode is presented. Based on the computational experiment a conclusion is drawn that SSO possesses a regularization property in terms of A.N. Tikhonov. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.