Abstract: A rate-distortion (R-D) optimized progressive coding algorithm for three-dimensional (3D) meshes is proposed in this work. We propose the prioritized gate selection and the curvature prediction to improve the connectivity and geometry compression performance, respectively. Furthermore, based on the bit plane coding, we develop a progressive transmission method, which improves the qualities of intermediate meshes as well as that of the fully reconstructed mesh, and extend it to the view-dependent transmission method. Experiments on various 3D mesh models show that the proposed algorithm provides significantly better compression performance than the conventional algorithms, while supporting progressive reconstruction efficiently.