An approach to automatically select stable and salient representative views of a given 3D object is proposed. Initially, a set of viewpoints are uniformly sampled along the surface of a bounding sphere. The sampled viewpoints are connected to their closest points to form a spherical graph in which each edge is weighted by a similarity measure between the two views from its incident vertices. Partitions of similar views are obtained using a graph partitioning procedure and their "centroids" are considered to be their representative views. Finally, the views are ranked based on a saliency measure to form the object?s representative views. This leads to a compact, human-oriented 2D description of a 3D object, and as such, is useful both for traditional applications like presentation and analysis of 3D shapes, and for emerging ones like indexing and retrieval in large shape repositories.