  Texture segmentation constitutes a standard image processing task, crucial to
many applications. The present contribution focuses on the particular subset of
scale-free textures and its originality resides in the combination of three key
ingredients: First, texture characterization relies on the concept of local
regularity ; Second, estimation of local regularity is based on new multiscale
quantities referred to as wavelet leaders ; Third, segmentation from local
regularity faces a fundamental bias variance trade-off: In nature, local
regularity estimation shows high variability that impairs the detection of
changes, while a posteriori smoothing of regularity estimates precludes from
locating correctly changes. Instead, the present contribution proposes several
variational problem formulations based on total variation and proximal
resolutions that effectively circumvent this trade-off. Estimation and
segmentation performance for the proposed procedures are quantified and
compared on synthetic as well as on real-world textures.
