We propose a new variational model in weighted Sobolev spaces with
non-standard weights and applications to image processing. We show that these
weights are, in general, not of Muckenhoupt type and therefore the classical
analysis tools may not apply. For special cases of the weights, the resulting
variational problem is known to be equivalent to the fractional Poisson
problem. The trace space for the weighted Sobolev space is identified to be
embedded in a weighted L2 space. We propose a finite element scheme to solve
the Euler-Lagrange equations, and for the image denoising application we
propose an algorithm to identify the unknown weights. The approach is
illustrated on several test problems and it yields better results when compared
to the existing total variation techniques