NeRF-Based Three-Dimensional Reconstruction for Large-Diameter Rescue Shafts

Large-diameter rescue shafts serve as critical infrastructure for emergency response in mining disaster scenarios, and their structural deformation directly affects the safe passage of rescue capsules. In this paper, we investigate three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques for large-diameter rescue shaft environments and develop a Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based reconstruction and deformation assessment scheme. The proposed workflow integrates no reference signal-to-noise-ratio (NR-SNR), image-quality filtering, SfM-based camera-pose estimation, Nerfacto reconstruction, point-cloud export, and circular-section fitting. The NR-SNR retention-ratio experiment shows that retaining approximately 35% high-quality images provides a practical efficiency–quality trade-off for the present dataset, reducing the computational burden of SfM pose estimation while preserving sufficient geometric information for subsequent reconstruction. The reconstructed radiance field is further exported as a dense point cloud and evaluated using relative radius error, circle-fitting residuals, and image-level rendering metrics. Experiments on a simulated large-diameter rescue shaft platform show that the proposed NeRF-based scheme provides favorable geometric measurement applicability and visual reconstruction quality under weak-texture and low-illumination conditions. Compared with conventional MVS and the tested 3DGS baseline, the proposed scheme produces a point-cloud output that is more suitable for subsequent circular-section fitting and deformation-related assessment. In addition, comparison with a representative SDF-based baseline indicates that direct implicit surface recovery remains challenging for the tested hollow cylindrical shaft-wall scene. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed NeRF-based workflow for rescue-shaft inner-wall reconstruction and engineering-oriented deformation evaluation.