The increasing popularity of composite materials in modern industries puts new demands on the quality control of used products. The well-established NDT methods, utilized in the metal structures evaluation, may be useful also in case of composites, but still there is as need of development of new or adaption of existing methods to composite materials properties. One of the methods is active infrared thermography (AT). In this paper the evaluation of composite samples using AT will be presented. The dedicated algorithm based on optimization methods will be used to estimate the geometrical parameters of material's defects.