Abstract Salient object detection has been attracting a lot of interest, and recently various heuristic computational models have been designed. In this paper, we regard saliency map computation as a regression problem. Our method, which is based on multi-level image segmentation, uses the supervised learning approach to map the regional feature vector to a saliency score, and fifinally fuses the saliency scores across multiple levels, yielding the saliency map. The contributions lie in two-fold. One is that we show our approach, which integrates the regional contrast, regional property and regional backgroundness descriptors together to form the master saliency map, is able to produce superior saliency maps to existing algorithms most of which combine saliency maps heuristically computed from difffferent types of features. The other is that we introduce a new regional feature vector, backgroundness, to characterize the background, which can be regarded as a counterpart of the objectness descriptor [2]. The performance evaluation on several popular benchmark data sets validates that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts