This paper is devoted to the challenging problem of fine structure detection with applications to bituminous surfacing crack recovery. Drogoul (2014) shows that such structures can be suitably modelled by a sequence of smooth functions whose Hessian matrices blow up in the perpendicular direction to the crack, while their gradient is null. This observation serves as the basis of the introduced model that also handles the natural dense and highly oscillatory texture exhibited by the images: we propose weighting ∂ 2 u This article is dedicated to our wonderful friend and researcher, Mila Nikolova.