Two-segment power-law approximation (black solid lines) to the distribution of filament column density contrasts observed in the Aquila molecular cloud (Arzoumanian et al. 2019): dN/dlog(δ_c)∼const for 0.3 ≤ δ_c ≤ 1, and d for 1 ≤ δ_c ≤ 4. The vertical dotted line marks the average filament contrast ⟨δ_c⟩∼1. The overplotted histogram shows the distribution of column density contrasts for the population of 100 synthetic filaments used in the simulation of Sect. 4.