The emissivity is a key parameter to measure the surface temperature of materials in the radiation thermometry. In this paper, the surface emissivity of metallic substrates is measured by the multi-wavelength emissivity measurement apparatus developed by the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). The measuring principle of this apparatus is based on the energy comparison. Several radiation thermometers, whose emissivity coefficients corrected by the measured emissivity from this apparatus, are used to measure the surface temperature of stainless steel substrates. The temperature values measured by means of radiation thermometry are compared to those measured by means of contact thermometry. The relative error between the two means is less than 2% at temperatures from 700K to 1300K, it suggests that the emissivity of stainless steel substrate measured by the multi-wavelength emissivity measurement apparatus are accurate and reliable. Emissivity measurements performed with this apparatus present an uncertainty of 5.9% (cover factor=2).