As the commission of a visible spectroscopic diagnostic to the HL-2A tokamak for the measurements of both bremsstrahlung continuum radiation and impurity line emission, a Bayesian tomography method has been developed to this diagnostic for the reconstruction of a 2D emission distribution from line-integrated data. In this method, Gaussian process prior is adopted as an effective way to regularize the smoothness of the emission field, which can be truncated to enforce non-negative constraint of the emission values. For the reliability and quality assessment, uncertainty of the reconstruction can be examined through its confidence interval derived from a posterior probability. Performance of this Gaussian process tomography method is exemplified by the reconstructions of the bremsstrahlung continuum emission, which coincide with the equilibrium magnetic flux surfaces with respect to position and shape. In another case the reconstruction of CVI line emission in the visible range (n = 8→7, 529.05 nm) disclose the existence of a bright radiation belt due to the plasma–wall interaction.
