A system and method that performs iterative foreground detection and multi-object segmentation in an image is disclosed herein. A new background prior is introduced to improve the foreground segmentation results. Three complimentary methods detect and segment foregrounds containing multiple objects. The first method performs an iterative segmentation of the image to pull out the salient objects in the image. In a second method, a higher dimensional embedding of the image graph is used to estimate the saliency score and extract multiple salient objects. A third method uses a metric to automatically pick the number of eigenvectors to consider in an alternative method to iteratively compute the image saliency map. Experimental results show that these methods succeed in accurately extracting multiple foreground objects from an image.