Total variation and cheeger cuts

In this work, inspired by (Buhler & Hein, 2009), (Strang, 1983), and (Zhang et al., 2009), we give a continuous relaxation of the Cheeger cut problem on a weighted graph. We show that the relaxation is actually equivalent to the original problem. We then describe an algorithm for finding good cuts suggested by the similarities of the energy of the relaxed problem and various well studied energies in image processing. Finally we provide experimental validation of the proposed algorithm, demonstrating its efficiency in finding high quality cuts.