When imaging the heart, using a 2D ultrasound probe, different views can manifest depending on the location and angulations of the probe. Some of these views have been labeled as standard views, due to the presentation and ease of assessment of key cardiac structures in them. We present an approach for automatic recognition and classification of these standard views, as a potential enabler for automated measurements or detection of noise - all without a human in the loop. We present an approach for view classification, Spatial Pyramid Histogram of Words which successfully models the appearance and shape distributions of object class. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique for the task of discrimination between the B-mode Parasternal Long Axis (PLAX) and the Short Axis (SAX) echocardiograms. For this task, our method shows a classification accuracy of 98.3% on an exhaustive database of 703 ultrasound images. © 2015 IEEE.