Bottom-up saliency detection algorithms identify distinct regions in an image, with rare occurrence of local feature distributions. Notable among those works published recently, use local and global contrast, spectral analysis of the entire image or graph based feature mapping. Whereas, we propose a novel unsupervised method using color compactness and statistical modeling of the background cues, to segment the salient foreground region and thus the salient object. At the first stage of processing, the image is segmented into clusters using color feature. First component proposed for our saliency measure combines disparity in color and spatial distance between patches. In addition to rarity of feature, we propose another component for saliency computation that estimates the divergence of the color of a patch from those in the set of patches at the boundary of the image, representing the background. Combination of these two complementary components provides a much improved saliency map for salient object detection.We verify the performance of our proposed method of saliency detection on two popular benchmark datasets, with one or more salient regions and diverse saliency characteristics. Experimental results show that our method out-performs many existing state-of-the-art methods. © 2013 IEEE.