To further explore the human visual system( HVS),the perceptual grouping( PG), which has been proven to play an important role in the HVS, is adopted to design an effective image quality assessment( IQA) model. Compared with the existing fixed-window-based models, the proposed one is an adaptive window-like model that introduces the perceptual grouping strategy into the IQA model. It works as follows: first,it preprocesses the images by clustering similar pixels into a group to the greatest extent; then the structural similarity is used to compute the similarity of the superpixels between reference and distorted images; finally, it integrates all the similarity of superpixels of an image to yield a quality score. Experimental results on three databases( LIVE, IVC and MICT) showthat the proposed method yields good performance in terms of correlation with human judgments of visual quality.