Cycle bases of graphs and sampled manifolds

Point samples of a surface in R3 are the dominant output of a multitude of 3D scanning devices. The usefulness of these devices rests on being able to extract properties of the surface from the sample. We show that, under certain sampling conditions, the minimum cycle basis of a nearest neighbor graph of the sample encodes topological information about the surface and yields bases for the trivial and non-trivial loops of the surface. We validate our results by experiments.