3D object shapes (represented by meshes) include both areas that attract the visual attention of human observers and others less or not attractive at all. This visual attention depends on the degree of saliency exposed by these areas. In this paper, we propose a technique for detecting salient regions in meshes. To do so, we define a local surface descriptor based on local patches of adaptive size and filled with a local height field. The saliency of mesh vertices is then defined as its degree measure with edges weights computed from adaptive patch similarities. Our approach is compared to the state-of-the-art and presents competitive results. A study evaluating the influence of the parameters establishing this approach is also carried out. The strength and the stability of our approach with respect to noise and simplication are also studied.