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This paper advocates a novel multiscale, structure-sensitive saliency detection method, which can distinguish multilevel, reliable saliency from various natural pictures in a robust and versatile way. One key challenge for saliency detection is to guarantee the entire salient object being characterized differently from nonsalient background. To tackle this, our strategy is to design a structure-aware descriptor based on the intrinsic biharmonic distance metric. One benefit of introducing this descriptor is its ability to simultaneously integrate local and global structure information, which is extremely valuable for separating the salient object from nonsalient background in a multiscale sense. Upon devising such powerful shape descriptor, the remaining challenge is to capture the saliency to make sure that salient subparts actually stand out among all possible candidates. Toward this goal, we conduct multilevel low-rank and sparse analysis in the intrinsic feature space spanned by the shape descriptors defined on over-segmented super-pixels. Since the low-rank property emphasizes much more on stronger similarities among super-pixels, we naturally obtain a scale space along the rank dimension in this way. Multiscale saliency can be obtained by simply computing differences among the low-rank components across the rank scale. We conduct extensive experiments on some public benchmarks, and make comprehensive, quantitative evaluation between our method and existing state-of-the-art techniques. All the results demonstrate the superiority of our method in accuracy, reliability, robustness, and versatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]