We introduce FreeLence, a lossless single-rate connectivity compression algorithm for triangle surface meshes. Based upon a geometry-driven traversal scheme we present two novel and simple concepts: free-valence connectivity encoding and entropy coding based on geometric context. Together these techniques yield signicantly smaller rates for connectivity compression than current state of the art approaches - valence-based algorithms and Angle- Analyzer, with an average of 36% improvement over the former and an average of 18% over the latter on benchmark 3D models, combined with the ability to well adapt to the regularity of meshes. We also prove that our algorithm exhibits a smaller worst case entropy
for a class of ”well-behaved” triangle meshes than valence-driven connectivity encoding approaches.