Singular Sets of Minimizers for the Mumford-Shah Functional

Book excerpt: The Mumford-Shah functional was introduced in the 1980s as a tool for automatic image segmentation, but its study gave rise to many interesting questions of analysis and geometric measure theory. The main object under scrutiny is a free boundary K where the minimizer may have jumps. The book presents an extensive description of the known regularity properties of the singular sets K, and the techniques to get them. It is largely self-contained, and should be accessible to graduate students in analysis. The core of the book is composed of regularity results that were proved in the last ten years and which are presented in a more detailed and unified way.