A method for reconstructing surface from a point cloud includes following steps: (a) extracting skeletal curves from an input point cloud; (b) editing the extracted skeletal curves, and assigning sweeping path; (c) obtaining sliced point clouds along the edited skeletal curves, and fitting a closed NURBS curve according to the sliced point clouds; (d) reconstructing the point cloud to get generalized cylinders along the assigned sweeping path, according to the closed NURBS curves; (e) merging the generalized cylinders into a single surface, and smoothing intersections of the generalized cylinders so as to reconstruct surface from the point cloud. The invention further relates to a system for reconstructing surface from a point cloud. The invention can reconstruct the surface with high accuracy by the minimum interactions, and can deal with point cloud data having missing region caused by occlusion. In addition, the invention can achieve high reconstruction quality and fine controllability.