The bipartite double cover of G has two vertices ui and wi for each vertex vi of G. Two vertices ui and wj are connected by an edge in the double cover if and only if vi and vj are connected by an edge in G. For instance, below is an illustration of a bipartite double cover of a non-bipartite graph G. In the illustration, each vertex in the tensor product is shown using a color from the first term of the product (G) and a shape from the second term of the product (K2); therefore, the vertices ui in the double cover are shown as circles while the vertices wi are shown as squares.
The bipartite double cover may also be constructed using adjacency matrices (as described below) or as the derived graph of a voltage graph in which each edge of G is labeled by the nonzero element of the two-element group.
The bipartite double cover of an odd-length cycle graph is a cycle of twice the length, while the bipartite double of any bipartite graph (such as an even length cycle, shown in the following example) is formed by two disjoint copies of the original graph.
[4] For instance, the graph with two vertices and one edge is bipartite but is not a bipartite double cover, because it has no non-adjacent pairs of vertices to be mapped to each other by such an involution; on the other hand, the graph of the cube is a bipartite double cover, and has an involution that maps each vertex to the diametrally opposite vertex.
If we replace one triangle by a square in H the resulting graph has four distinct double covers.
Instead, it can be obtained as the orientable double cover of an embedding of K6 on the projective plane.