Total variation is a fundamental concept in the calculus of variations, which deals with the optimization of functionals. It quantifies the "amount of variation" or "oscillation" in a function and is defined for a function as follows:
This definition essentially measures how much the function changes over the interval . The total variation can be thought of as a way to capture the "roughness" or "smoothness" of a function. In optimization problems, functions with bounded total variation are often preferred because they tend to have more desirable properties, such as being easier to optimize and leading to stable solutions. Additionally, total variation plays a crucial role in various applications, including image processing, where it is used to reduce noise while preserving edges.
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