Images captured in hazy weather conditions often suffer from color contrast and color fidelity. This degradation is represented by transmission map which represents the amount of attenuation and airlight which represents the color of additive noise. In this paper, we have proposed a method to estimate the transmission map using haze levels instead of airlight color since there are some ambiguities in estimation of airlight. Qualitative and quantitative results of proposed method show competitiveness of the method given. In addition we have proposed two metrics which are based on statistics of natural outdoor images for assessment of haze removal algorithms.