The development of near-infrared (NIR) optical imaging for biomedical optical imaging is hampered by the computational intensiveness of large-scale three-dimensional (3-D) image reconstruction and the potential lack of endogenous contrast for detection of relevant tissue features. In this contribution the inverse optical imaging problem is formulated in three dimensions in a noncompressive geometry as a simple-bound constrained minimization problem in order to recover the interior fluorescence properties of exogenous contrast agent from frequency-domain photon migration measurements at the boundary. The solution of the forward optical diffusion problem for the frustum shape containing fluorescence inclusions of 10:1 contrast is accomplished by use of the Galerkin finite-element formulation. The inverse approach employs the truncated Newton method with trust region and a modification of automatic reverse differentiation to speed the computation of the optimization problem. The image-reconstruction results confirm that the constrained minimization may offer a more logical approach for the 3-D optical imaging problem than unconstrained optimization.