Based on salient visual regions for mobile robot navigation in unknown environments, a new place recognition system was presented. The system uses monocular camera to acquire omni-directional images of the environment where the robot locates. Salient local regions are detected from these images using center-surround difference method, which computes opponencies of color and texture among multi-scale image spaces. And then they are organized using hidden Markov model (HMM) to form the vertex of topological map. So localization, that is place recognition in our system, can be converted to evaluation of HMM. Experimental results show that the saliency detection is immune to the changes of scale, 2D rotation and viewpoint etc. The created topological map has smaller size and a higher ratio of recognition is obtained.