  Characterizing the phase transitions of convex optimizations in recovering
structured signals or data is of central importance in compressed sensing,
machine learning and statistics. The phase transitions of many convex
optimization signal recovery methods such as $\ell_1$ minimization and nuclear
norm minimization are well understood through recent years' research. However,
rigorously characterizing the phase transition of total variation (TV)
minimization in recovering sparse-gradient signal is still open. In this paper,
we fully characterize the phase transition curve of the TV minimization. Our
proof builds on Donoho, Johnstone and Montanari's conjectured phase transition
curve for the TV approximate message passing algorithm (AMP), together with the
linkage between the minmax Mean Square Error of a denoising problem and the
high-dimensional convex geometry for TV minimization.
