This paper presents a new algorithm for the progressive compression of manifold polygon meshes. The input surface is decimated by several traversals that generate successive levels of detail through a specific patch decimation operator which combines vertex removal and local remeshing. The mesh connectivity is encoded by two lists of Boolean error predictions based on the mesh geometry: one for the inserted edges and the other for the faces with a removed center vertex. The mesh geometry is encoded with a barycentric error prediction of the removed vertex coordinates and a local curvature prediction. We also include two methods that improve the rate-distortion performance: a wavelet formulation with a lifting scheme and an adaptive quantization technique. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of compression rates and rate-distortion performance.