The precise temperature distribution measurement is crucial in many industrial fields, where ultrasonic tomography (UT) has broad application prospects and significance. In order to improve the resolution of reconstructed temperature distribution images and maintain high accuracy, a novel two-step reconstruction method is proposed in this article. First, the problem of solving the temperature distribution is converted to an optimization problem and then solved by an improved version of the equilibrium optimizer (IEO), in which a new nonlinear time strategy and novel population update rules are deployed. Then, based on the low-resolution and high-precision images reconstructed by IEO, Gaussian process regression (GPR) is adopted to enhance image resolution and keep the reconstruction errors low. After that, the number of divided grids and the parameters of IEO are also further studied to improve the reconstruction quality. The results of numerical simulations and experiments indicate that high-resolution images with low reconstruction errors can be reconstructed effectively by the proposed IEO-GPR method, and it also shows excellent robust performance. For a complex three-peak temperature distribution, a competitive accuracy with 3.10% and 2.37% error at root-mean-square error and average relative error is achieved, respectively. In practical experiment, the root-mean-square error of IEO-GPR is 0.72%, which is at least 0.89% lower than that of conventional algorithms.