Abstract In this paper, we address a haze removal problem from a single nighttime image, even in the presence of varicolored and non-uniform illumination. The core idea lies in a novel maximum reflectance prior. We first introduce the nighttime hazy imaging model, which includes a local ambient illumination item in both direct attenuation term and scattering term. Then, we propose a simple but effective image prior, maximum reflectance prior, to estimate the varying ambient illumination. The maximum reflectance prior is based on a key observation: for most daytime haze-free image patches, each color channel has very high intensity at some pixels. For the nighttime haze image, the local maximum intensities at each color channel are mainly contributed by the ambient illumination. Therefore, we can directly estimate the ambient illumination and transmission map, and consequently restore a high quality haze-free image. Experimental results on various nighttime hazy images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In particular, our approach has the advantage of computational efficiency, which is 10- 100 times faster than state-of-the-art methods