The magnetic fields generated in plasmas have extensive influences on many processes of the inertial confinement fusion and the astrophysics. Therefore, the quantitative diagnosis of the magnetic field is quite essential. Proton radiography is a widely used experimental technique to diagnose the electric field or magnetic field in high-energy-density plasma. The effective explanation of the results of proton radiography depends on the reliability and availability of the inversion method. Traditional inversion methods can only provide one- or two-dimensional structure of the self-generated magnetic field. In this study, it is found that there is an Abel transformation relationship between the deflection velocity and the magnetic field with column symmetry, which allows us to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the magnetic field for the first time. We theoretically deduce the process of reconstructing the cylindrical magnetic field through proton radiography with the Abel inversion algorithm. The feasibility of this method is verified by numerical simulation as well. Based on this inversion method, we reanalyze the proton radiography experimental results of Li et al. (2016 Nat. Commun. 7 13081) on the self-generated magnetic field of plasma jets. The inversion results show that the maximum magnetic field intensity is about 1.9 times the traditional inversion results. We discuss a new proton radiography inversion method for the existence of magnetic fields with cylindrical symmetry in thiswork, which will contributes to an intensive understanding of the self-generated electromagnetic field and its spatiotemporal evolution related to the laser fusion and the laboratory astrophysics.