This paper presents the studies of time domain inverse scattering for a two-dimensional inhomogeneous dielectric cylinder buried in a half-space by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method and evolutionary algorithms (EAs). For forward scattering, the FDTD method is employed to calculate the scattered E fields, while for the inverse scattering the evolutionary algorithms are utilized to determine the permittivity of the buried cylindrical scatterer with arbitrary cross section. The results obtained for different examples show that the dynamic differential evolution (DDE) algorithms outperform the non-uniform steady state genetic algorithm (NU-SSGA) variants in terms of finding best optima. The suitability and efficiency of applying these two methods for microwave imaging of 2-D inhomogeneous dielectric cylinders are examined. Moreover, when the measured scattered fields are contaminated with Gaussian noise, DDE is able to yield good reconstructed quality.