In region-of-interest (ROI)-based video coding, ROI parts of the frame are encoded with higher quality than non-ROI parts. At low bit rates, such encoding may produce attention-grabbing coding artifacts, which may draw viewer's attention away from ROI, thereby degrading visual quality. In this paper, we present a saliency-aware video compression method for ROI-based video coding. The proposed method aims at reducing salient coding artifacts in non-ROI parts of the frame in order to keep user's attention on ROI. Further, the method allows saliency to increase in high quality parts of the frame, and allows saliency to reduce in non-ROI parts. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is able to improve visual quality of encoded video relative to conventional rate distortion optimized video coding, as well as two state-of-the art perceptual video coding methods.