On the total variation Wasserstein gradient flow and the TV-JKO scheme

Abstract: We study the JKO scheme for the total variation, characterize the optimizers, prove some of their qualitative properties (in particular a form of maximum principle and in some cases, a minimum principle as well). Finally, we establish a convergence result as the time step goes to zero to a solution of a fourth-order nonlinear evolution equation, under the additional assumption that the density remains bounded away from zero. This lower bound is shown in dimension one and in the radially symmetric case.