While the detection of the interesting regions in images has been extensively studied, relatively few papers have addressed surfaces. This paper proposes an algorithm for detecting the regions of interest of surfaces. It looks for regions that are distinct both locally and globally and accounts for the distance to the foci of attention. It is also shown how this algorithm can be adopted to saliency detection in point clouds. Many applications can utilize these regions. In this paper we explore one such application-viewpoint selection. The most informative views are those that collectively provide the most descriptive presentation of the surface. We show that our results compete favorably with the state-of-the-art results.