Euler-Lagrange equations for variable-growth total variation

We consider a class of integral functionals with Musielak-Orlicz type variable growth, possibly linear in some regions of the domain. This includes $p(x)$ power-type integrands with $p(x)\ge 1$ as well as double-phase $p\text{\hspace{0.17em}⁣}-\text{\hspace{0.17em}⁣}q$ integrands with $p=1$. The main goal of this paper is to identify the $L^2$-subdifferential of the functional, including a local characterisation in terms of a variant of the Anzellotti product defined through the Young’s inequality. As an application, we obtain the Euler-Lagrange equation for the variant of the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi image denoising problem with variable growth regularising term.