In this paper we introduce a novel approach for progressive transmission of three-dimensional (3D) triangular meshes. This algorithm is based on a new reversing approach of the irregular mesh subdivision that enables a wavelet representation of any mesh geometry. In this paper, we show how to achieve progressive compression of 3D models by transmitting more and more wavelet coefficients computed from the original mesh vertices coordinates. The connectivity of the reconstructed mesh remains the same as the original one, but its geometry is progressively refined by means of bitplane encoding. This approach processes directly floating point coordinates which is the most common representation for 3D meshes, and does not need quantization, which is a lossy transformation. Experimental results are given and demonstrate the efficiency of our encoding scheme versus other approaches. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.