Summary: The increasing need for image communication and storage has created a great necessity for securely transforming and storing images over a network. Whereas traditional image encryption algorithms usually consider the security of the whole plain image, region of interest (ROI) encryption schemes, which are of great importance in practical applications, protect the privacy regions of plain images. Existing ROI encryption schemes usually adopt approximate techniques to detect the privacy region and measure the quality of encrypted images; however, their performance is usually inconsistent with a human visual system (HVS) and is sensitive to statistical attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware ROI image encryption (PRIE) scheme based on logistical mapping and data hiding. The proposed scheme utilizes salient object detection to automatically, adaptively and accurately detect the privacy region of a given plain image. After private pixels have been encrypted using chaotic cryptography, the significant bits are embedded into the nonprivacy region of the plain image using data hiding. Extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the consistency between our automatic ROI detection and HVS. Our experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed scheme exhibits satisfactory security performance.