Computer vision applications such as surveillance, topography categorization, and independent navigation need accurate detection of image features and hence requires clear visibility. But the images captured in outdoor scenes are usually degraded by the particles in the atmosphere and hence loses the contrast and color fidelity. The paper presents a significant methodological review on different categories of visibility enhancement techniques in weather degraded outdoor scenes and provides comprehensive descriptions of various representative methods in each of this category. Based on the rigorous review of these publications, the paper also explores a comparative analysis of some prominent image enhancement techniques for visibility restoration in our own SAMEER-TU database to verify the robustness of these used methods. © 2017 IEEE.