Electromagnetic inverse problems have been found in numerous research areas, such as medical imaging, non-destructive testing, geophysical prospecting and microwave tomography. These inverse problems can be considered as a large-scale nonlinear programming problem. In the paper, a quasi-Newton algorithm based on Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) Hessian matrix updating formula is introduced and applied to solve two-dimensional (2-D) electromagnetic inverse problems. Numerical results of image reconstruction from the simulation data for some dielectric cylinders are given, and the efficiency of the proposed method for image reconstruction is evaluated.