Staircasing effect for minimizers of the one-dimensional discrete Perona–Malik functional

We consider the one-dimensional Perona–Malik functional, that is the energy associated to the celebrated forward-backward equation introduced by P. Perona and J. Malik in the context of image processing, with the addition of a forcing term. We discretize the functional by restricting its domain to a finite dimensional space of piecewise constant functions, and by replacing the derivative with a difference quotient. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of minima and minimizers as the discretization scale vanishes. In particular, if the forcing term has bounded variation, we show that any sequence of minimizers converges in the sense of varifolds to the graph of the forcing term, but with tangent component which is a combination of the horizontal and vertical directions. If the forcing term is more regular, we also prove that minimizers actually develop a microstructure that looks like a piecewise constant function at a suitable scale, which is intermediate between the macroscopic scale and the scale of the discretization.