The main disadvantage of transverse flux induction heating (TFIH) is its resulting non-uniform temperature distribution on the surface of the strip at the inductor outlet. For obtaining a uniform temperature distribution, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) named velocity-controlled PSO (VCPSO) is proposed and applied to optimize this problem. Support vector machine (SVM) is adopted to establish a regression model to replace the complex and time-consuming coupling calculation process involved in TFIH problem. Simulation results of several test functions show that VCPSO performs much better than standard PSO (SPSO). Moreover, based on the existing research and experiments, the application of VCPSO combined with SVM to the TFIH problem achieves satisfactory results.