The impact of perceptual relevance information on content aware image retargeting is investigated. We integrated fixation density maps and region-of-interest maps into a contemporary image retargeting algorithm to test the hypothesis that the latter result in superior performance given their object level representation. We performed an experimental study with human participants to evaluate the performance gains relative to benchmark conditions. The experiment revealed that the kind of perceptual relevance information, image content, and retargeting ratio all have a strong impact on the overall performance. Recorded response times provided further insight into the difficulty that people experienced when performing the assessment task. These findings are instrumental for the image retargeting research community to further improve their algorithms by augmenting content awareness with perceptual relevance.