Disclosed herein are techniques and systems for computing geodesic saliency of images using background priors. An input image may be segmented into a plurality of patches, and a graph associated with the image may be generated, the graph comprising nodes and edges. The nodes of the graph include nodes that correspond to the plurality of patches of the image plus an additional virtual background node that is added to the graph. The graph further includes edges that connect the nodes to each other, including internal edges between adjacent patches and boundary edges between those patches at the boundary of the image and the virtual background node. Using this graph, a saliency value, called the “geodesic” saliency, for each patch of the image is determined as a length of a shortest path from a respective patch to the virtual background node.