To solve the storage and network transmission problem of the three-Dimensional (3D) mesh model, a new 3D model compression algorithm was proposed. Based on the slicing for 3D mesh, the proposed algorithm was composed of the following three steps: slice vertex calculation, slice boundary sampling and encoding for the image obtained by slicing. For a given 3D mesh model, the bounding box of the model was firstly calculated; then the model was sliced along the longest direction of the bounding box. In the procedure of slicing, the intersection point of the slice with the edge of the mesh was calculated, and as a result, all the intersection points in the same slice constituted a polygon. Then the boundary of the polygon was uniformly resampled so that each layer of the slice had the same number of vertices. After resampling of the polygon boundary, the coordinates of vertices in each slice were converted into the polar form. In this way, all ρ-coordinates and θ-coordinates of the vertices in each slice could constitute one image respectively, and the original 3D model could be represented by these two images. The new representation method has two obvious advantages: first, the dimension of the data is reduced, thus the amount of the data is effectively reduced; second, the data in these two images have great data correlation, and as a result, the entropy of the data is further reduced. Based on these two advantages, the proposed algorithm compressed these two images by difference coding technique and arithmetic coding technique, and then the compressed files were obtained. Compared with Incremental Parametric Refinement (IPR) method, the coding efficiency of the proposed algorithm was increased by 23% under the same quality of the decoded model. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain good compression efficiency, and effectively reduce the data amount in the application of 3D model storage and transmission.