To improve the accuracy and reduce the calculation cost for the inverse problem of centrifugal pump impeller, the new inverse method based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is proposed. The pump blade shape is parameterized by quartic Bezier curve, and the initial snapshots is generated by introducing the perturbation of the blade shape control parameters. The internal flow field and its hydraulic performance is predicted by CFD method. The snapshots vector includes the blade shape parameter and the distribution of blade load. The POD basis for the snapshots set are deduced by proper orthogonal decomposition. The sample vector set is expressed in terms of the linear combination of the orthogonal basis. The objective blade shape corresponding to the objective distribution of blade load is obtained by least square fit. The Iterative correction algorithm for the centrifugal pump blade inverse method based on POD is proposed. The objective blade load distributions are corrected according to the difference of the CFD result and the POD result. The two dimensional and three dimensional blade calculation cases show that the proposed centrifugal pump blade inverse method based on POD have good convergence and high accuracy, and the calculation cost is greatly reduced. After two iterations, the deviation of the blade load and the pump hydraulic performance are limited within 4.0% and 6.0% individually for most of the flow rate range. This paper provides a promising inverse method for centrifugal pump impeller, which will benefit the hydraulic optimization of centrifugal pump.