In this paper, we present a method to detect stable components on 3D meshes. A component is a region on the mesh which contains discriminative local features. Our goal is to represent a 3D mesh with a set of regions, which we called key-components, that characterize the represented object and therefore, they could be used for effective matching and recognition. As key-components are features in coarse scales, they are less sensitive to mesh deformations such as noise. In addition, the number of key-components is low compared to other local representations such as keypoints, allowing us to use them in efficient subsequent tasks. An desirable characteristic of a decomposition is that the components should be repeatable regardless shape transformations. We show in the experiments that the key-components are repeatable under several transformations using the SHREC'2010 feature detection benchmark. © The Eurographics Association 2012.