In this paper, we propose a 3D geometry compression technique for densely sampled surface meshes. Based on a 3D multiresolution analysis (performed by a 3D Discrete Wavelet Transform for semi-regular meshes), this scheme includes a model-based bit allocation process across the wavelet subbands and an efficient surface adapted weighted criterion for 3D wavelet coefficient coordinates. This permits to highly improve the visual quality of quantized meshes obtained by classical bit allocation based on MSE distortion. Moreover, the coefficients are encoded with an original 3D contextbased bitplane arithmetic coder. The main contribution of