We present a multi-scale representation of grey-level shape, called the scale-space primal sketch, that makes explicit features in scale-space as well as the relations between features at different levels of scale. The representation gives a qualitative description of the image structure that allows for extraction of significant image structure — stable scales and regions of interest-in a solely bottom-up data-driven manner. Hence, it can be seen as preceding further processing, which can then be properly tuned. Experiments on real imagery demonstrate that the proposed theory gives intuitively reasonable results.