Abstract: A new progressive lossless 3D triangular mesh encoder is proposed in this work, which can encode any 3D triangular mesh with an arbitrary topological structure. Given a mesh, the quantized 3D vertices are first partitioned into an octree (OT) structure, which is then traversed from the root and gradually to the leaves. During the traversal, each 3D cell in the tree front is subdivided into eight childcells. For each cell subdivision, both local geometry and connectivity changes are encoded, where the connectivity coding is guided by the geometry coding. Furthermore, prioritized cell subdivision is performed in the tree front to provide better rate-distortion (RD) performance. Experiments show that the proposed mesh coder outperforms the kd-tree algorithm in both geometry and connectivity coding efficiency. For the geometry coding part, the range of improvement is typically around 10%-20%, but may go up to 50%-60% for meshes with highly regular geometry data and/or tight clustering of vertices.