A method for determining a salient region of an image is disclosed. For a plurality of different saliency cue functions, a single saliency value is calculated for each pixel in a plurality of adjacent pixels in an image using the saliency cue function, wherein one of the saliency cue functions is based on whether the pixel is in a region of the image whose colors contrast with the region's background and another of the saliency cue functions is based on a foreground and background color models of the image. A classifier is used to calculate a combined single saliency value for each pixel based on the single saliency values for the pixel. The salient region of the pixels is determined with a subwindow search based on the combined single saliency values.