This paper presents a novel approach for the progressive transmission of highly detailed surfaces interactively. Based on the characteristics in human vision, 3D surfaces are converted into the hierarchical quadtree in parameter space and a normal texture atlas. By taking advantage of normal mapping, only the silhouette to current viewpoint is refined and transmitted, and consequently the amount of patches needed to transfer each frame is greatly reduced. The structure of the representation is simple, so efficient compression scheme can be applied to encoding the hierarchical topological structure. At the same time, the parametric patches can be transmitted in arbitrary order due to their regular connectivity, so the truly view-dependent transmission could be achieved in high efficiency. Experiment results show that the approach proposed is feasible and highly efficient in meeting the requirement, especially to those models with highly detailed surfaces.