Previous work on progressive mesh compression focused on triangle meshes but meshes containing other types of faces are commonly used. Therefore, we propose a new progressive mesh compression method that can efficiently compress meshes with arbitrary face degrees. Its compression performance is competitive with approaches dedicated to progressive triangle mesh compression. Progressive mesh compression is linked to mesh decimation because both applications generate levels of detail. Consequently, we propose a new simple volume metric to drive the polygon mesh decimation. We apply this metric to the progressive compression and the simplification of polygon meshes. We then show that the features offered by progressive mesh compression algorith...