Perceptual block merging for quadtree-based partitioning in HEVC using disorderly concealment effect

To remove the information redundancy among blocks, quadtree-based block partitioning is used in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). In this paper, we propose a perceptual block merging method for quadtree-based partitioning in HEVC based on the disorderly concealment effect in human perception. We segment a frame into orderly and disorderly regions using a free-energy based just-noticeable-difference (FEJND) model, and perceptually calculate the rate-distortion (RD) cost during the merging process from the visual sensitivity to distortions in different regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better rate-SSIM performance and make the merging results more correlated with human perception than HM12.0 anchor while maintaining its visual quality of the video sequences.