Todays task is to restart implementing Alpha Hulls. After thinking about it, the only difference between Alpha Shapes in a point set (where there is no prior knowledge of connectivity) are the links which are seperated by a distance greater than alpha. As a result it should be possible to treat the data as a point set and then pass over the dataset afterwards reinstating links that are larger than alpha. This may result in an increased number of internal faces but analysis of surface curvature should allow for relativly simple removal of these cases.

New paper.
Three-dimensional Alpha Shapes (1994)

Herbert Edelsbrunner, Ernst P. Mücke
ACM Transactions on Graphics