Image retargeting is the process of changing the aspect ratio of an image while minimizing the distortions in the content. Multiple retargeting techniques use saliency maps to identify the important parts of the image. The caveat of such maps is that they tend to give equal importance to different objects without acknowledging what the objects are. This may degrade the performance of the retargeting process as some objects are more sensitive to distortions than others. In this paper, we propose an adaptive image retargeting method that uses a novel object-aware importance map that takes into account the level of importance for the different objects in the image. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing retargeting techniques in subjective and objective measures.