You need to do a grid search, either using cross validation, or using a separate validation data set to get good values for C and gamma. Libsvm has a script called grid.py that is useful for this. I noticed you tagged this with matlab, using grid.py needs command line tools and a python installation (IMO this generally works out better than with matlab, especially if you have a some big machines to run many jobs in parallel).
I recommend that you read the libsvm guide if you haven't already done so: http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/papers/guide/guide.pdf.
I also suggest you initially use the same dataset as used for the paper as occasionally published algorithms only work well on the dataset chosen for the paper.
Lastly, you could contact the authors of the paper.