This study presents a passive islanding detection technique based on the approach of total variation filtering (TVF) for inverter-based distributed generation under noisy environment. Contamination of noise in the signal makes the islanding detection threshold less reliable. Therefore, the modal voltage signal is analysed through TVF-based decomposition procedure and several statistical features are obtained from its output. For decision making, the features are compared with the prespecified threshold. To tackle the challenge of islanding detection in the presence of the high-quality factor load, phase angle of the positive sequence voltage is considered as the second level of detection criterion. The proposed scheme is validated on IEEE 34-bus standard distribution system. The scheme is tested under islanding as well as all possible non-islanding network disturbances. Hardware-in-loop results are also presented in support of the theory. A comparative analysis of the proposed algorithm with the well-established S-transform is presented. The proposed scheme is found to be working effectively and can detect islanding condition within three cycles of its inception. © 2020 IET. All rights reserved.