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In this letter, a fast and efficient haze removal method is presented. We employ an extremum approximate method to extract the atmospheric light and propose a contour preserving estimation to obtain the transmission by using edge-preserving and mean filters alternately. Our method can efficiently avoid the halo artifact generated in the recovered image. To meet the requirement of real-time applications, an 11-stage pipelined hardware architecture for our haze removal method is presented. It can achieve 200 MHz with 12.8 K gate counts by using TSMC 0.13-\mum technology. Simulation results indicate that our design can obtain comparable results with the least execution time compared to previous algorithms and is suitable for low-cost high-performance hardware implementation for haze removal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]