Abstract: Owing to their efficiency for conveying perceptual information of the underlying shape and their pleasing perceiving in visual aesthetics experience, line drawings are now becoming a widely used technique for illustrating 3D shapes. Using a center-surrounding bilateral filter operator on Gaussian-weighted average of local projection height between mesh vertices and their neighbors, a new perceptual-saliency measure which can depict surface salient features, is proposed in this paper. Due to the definition of perceptual-saliency measure, our perceptual-saliency extremum lines can be considered as the ridge-valley lines of perceptual-saliency measure along the principal curvature directions on triangular meshes. The experimental results demonstrate that these extremum lines effectively capture and depict 3D shape information visually, especially for archaeological artifacts.