We present a method to speed up the computation of a high-quality data-dependent triangulation approximating an image using simulated annealing by probability distributions guided by local approximation error and its variance. The triangulation encodes the image, yielding compression rates comparable to or even superior to JPEG and JPEG2000 compression. The specific contributions of our paper are a speed-up of the simulated annealing optimization and a comparison of our approach to other image approximation and compression methods. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive vertex insertion/removal strategy and termination criteria for the simulated annealing to achieve specified approximation error bounds.