A brightness preservation dehazing algorithm based on the atmospheric scattering model is proposed. We introduce a novel pixel-patch-wise transmission. It not only can keep the scene radiance depth from becoming underestimated, it also preserves image color and brightness. First, based on the correlation of saturation and brightness in hue, saturation, and intensity color space, a pixel-wise transmission is estimated. To add the local information into the transmission, then a novel patch-wise visual mask by the free-energy principle is presented. With this mask, we can optimize the transmission and atmospheric light. Since the proposed method takes account of pixel, patch, and pattern information, it can restore more natural haze-free scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better restorations compared with some other state-of-the-art approaches.