A stable and reliable Abel inversion code is developed to obtain the radial profile of emissivity from chord integrated data, by expanding the radial emissivity in the form of a Zernike polynomial. The inversion is performed using the matrix inversion technique and employing the singular value decomposition method. The error in reconstruction is estimated using simulated data for different emissivity. The error is found to be less than 2% and the standard deviation is 7 × 10 −3 for a circularly symmetric plasma. The Abel inversion code is used to obtain the radial profile of the emissivity of an optically thin arc plasma.