Mesh saliency was introduced and joined the community of computer graphics ten years ago, which can benefit various applications, for instance, mesh reduction, mesh segmentation, self-similarity matching, scan integration, volume rendering, 3D printing, etc. Before, saliency detection had been successfully applied to image processing and pattern recognition to study how the world is perceptually intelligible for robots. In contrast to color of images and coherence of videos, geometric signals are defined with two-dimensional manifolds whose discrete representation is irregular, leading differences to the nature and difficulties to the solution of mesh saliency. To tackle the challenge, the last decade has witnessed significant advances in mesh saliency detection. However, a survey of recent advances in mesh saliency detection as well as its applications does not yet exist to date. This paper provides a first and comprehensive reference source of shape context based mesh saliency for researchers from a wide range of domains, including but not limited to computer graphics and vision. It reviews main contributions, advantages, drawbacks, and applications of known mesh saliency detection methods and discusses current trends and outlook for future study. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.