Salient region detection is useful for several image-processing applications, such as adaptive compression, object recognition, image retrieval, filter design, and image retargeting. A novel method to determine the salient regions of images is proposed in this paper. The L₀ smoothing filter and principle component analysis (PCA) play important roles in our framework. The L₀ filter is extremely helpful in characterizing fundamental image constituents, i.e., salient edges, and can simultaneously diminish insignificant details, thus producing more accurate boundary information for background merging and boundary scoring. PCA can reduce computational complexity as well as attenuate noise and translation errors. A local-global contrast is then used to calculate the distinction. Finally, image segmentation is used to achieve full-resolution saliency maps. The proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art saliency detection methods and shown to yield higher precision-recall rates and F-measures.