In this work, the nonlinear kinematic hardening combined with Voce isotropic hardening was selected to characterize the material behavior of advanced high strength steel sheet samples subjected to a few reverse loading cycles. Multi-components of backstress were considered for the combined nonlinear kinematical hardening model, namely, one, two, and three backstress components. To calibrate the model, an inverse problem solution tool, so-called virtual fields method, which takes full advantage of full-field deformation measurement, was applied to identify the material constitutive parameters. First, finite element simulations of forward-reverse simple shear were performed to validate the proposed identification method. The influence of strain noise on the identification accuracy was also evaluated. Then, the proposed method was applied to three kinds of sheet metals (DP600, TRIP780 and TWIP980) tested under two cycles of forward-reverse simple shear for parameter identification. The identification results obtained with different number of backstress components were critically discussed.