Preservation of Piecewise Constancy under TV Regularization with Rectilinear Anisotropy

Abstract: A recent result by Lasica, Moll and Mucha about the $\ell^1$-anisotropic Rudin-Osher-Fatemi model in $\mathbb{R}^2$ asserts that the solution is piecewise constant on a rectilinear grid, if the datum is. By means of a new proof we extend this result to $\mathbb{R}^n$. The core of our proof consists in showing that averaging operators associated to certain rectilinear grids map subgradients of the $\ell^1$-anisotropic total variation seminorm to subgradients.