Abstract: This paper presents literature survey on various haze removal techniques. Haze causes problems in various computer vision and image processing based applications as it diminishes the scene's visibility. The air light and attenuation are two main phenomena responsible for haze formation .The air light enhance the whiteness in the scene and contrast get reduced by attenuation. Haze removal techniques helps in recovering the contrast and color of the scene. These techniques have found many applications in the area of image processing such as consumer electronics, object detection, outdoor surveillance etc. The aim of the paper is to explore various methods used for efficiently removing haze from digital images. This paper ends up with the short comings of the existing methods.

Keywords: Airlight, Image Dehazing, Contrast enhancement, Dark channel prior, CLAHE, MIX-CLAHE.