Building on recent progress in modeling ?lter response statistics of natural images we integrate a statistical model into a variational framework for image segmentation. Incorporated in a sound probabilistic distance measure the model drives level sets toward meaningful segmentations of complex textures and natural scenes. Since each region comprises two model parameters only the approach is computationally ef?cient and enables the application of variational segmentation to a considerably larger class of real-world images. We validate the statistical basis of our approach on thousands of natural images and demonstrate that our model outperforms recent variational segmentation methods based on second-order statistics.