An analogue of the total variation prior for the normal vector field along the boundary of smooth shapes in 3D is introduced. The analysis of the total variation of the normal vector field is based on a differential geometric setting in which the unit normal vector is viewed as an element of the twodimensional sphere manifold. It is shown that spheres are stationary points when the total variation of the normal is minimized under an area constraint. Shape calculus is used to characterize the relevant derivatives. Since the total variation functional is non-differentiable whenever the boundary contains flat regions, an extension of the split Bregman method to manifold valued functions is proposed.Notice that we restrict the discussion to the isotropic case here, i.e., | · | 2 denotes the Euclidean norm. Moreover, Du is the derivative of u and {e 1 , e 2 } denotes the standard Euclidean basis. The seminorm (1.1) extends to less regular, so-called BV functions (bounded variation), whose distributional gradient exists only in the sense of measures. We refer the reader to Giusti, 1984;Attouch, Buttazzo, Michaille, 2006 for an extensive discussion of BV functions. The utility of (1.1) as a regularizer, or prior, lies in the fact that it favors piecewise constant solutions.In this paper, we introduce a novel regularizer based on the total variation, which can be used, for instance, in shape optimization applications as well as geometric inverse problems. In the latter class, the unknown, which one seeks to recover, is a shape Ω ⊂ R 3 , which might represent the location of a source or inclusion inside a given, larger domain, or the geometry of an inclusion or a scatterer. The boundary of Ω will be denoted by Γ.The novel functional, which we term the total variation of the normal field along a smooth surface Γ, is defined by |n| T V (Γ) := Γ |(D Γ n) ξ 1 | 2 g + |(D Γ n) ξ 2 | 2 g 1/2 ds (1.2)Date: August 22, 2019.